the opening of a cut grape
the butterfly
if it were to lightly rest upon the extremity of the grape
and pretend to drink
if it wasn’t drinking
what was to be done then?
I would have to
improve how well I see, with these eyes
improve how well I hear sounds
and so, employing my hands
I noticed
the smallest of movements
(translations)
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new and recent books:
After descending into the basement, you act as if you never went, as if you have no idea what the basement really is or what happened there. Even though you left the girl you once were in the basement, you spent the rest of your nights pretending it didn’t happen.
(fiction)
The poems in Naming the Rose draw from vulnerable, autobiographical elements mixed with the obliviousness of those around the speaker. The two-sectioned poem “The Light of Day” contrasts loving memories of pumpkin carving by the speaker’s daughter with the fear of the speaker-mother as her partner and the father of her daughter, “drunk,” “too drunk,” “rid[es] down the highway at 90 miles an hour” with “a huge stolen pumpkin on [her] lap.”
(reviews)
The holes breathed damp breath that wasn’t quite alive but wasn’t dead either. It takes little to make beauty out of wreckage, wreckage out of beauty. Winter sun gleams in the spray, constellates in the ice. A Buick skids from the road and tumbles across a bare field.
(nonfiction)
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new and recent books:
He had written DECEASED next to my mother’s name on his return. That threw the whole system off, sending his return into the void for further review. Since the entire IRS was working from home due to Covid-19, which arrived approximately two weeks after my mother’s death, apparently every day was now Leap Day, and perhaps in another four years my father might get his refund.
This collection of poems explores the fracture of a marriage after a secret is revealed—a husband’s closeted homosexuality, at odds with his religious upbringing and the life he has built. Set against the pastoral backdrop of stables and gardens, canning jars and roving horses, tether & lung traverses the landscape of loss and longing with striking vulnerability.
(reviews)
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new and recent books:
I walk across the highway to the other side, lean over the same crumbling concrete guardrail and look down into the stagnant cesspool. As I slowly raise my head, I follow the canal as it extends in a straight line out to Lake Michigan. The huge, shadowy metal structures of the steel makers stand along the shore, and next to them, barely visible, a towering crane.
If God appears on these pages, it is in the sacred clarity of the concrete detail. The speaker as a young girl, drawing ankhs and peace signs in the back of her bible, listening to a hymn as it slides beneath the pews.
(reviews)
Can violence be made into beauty? Can beauty be used to dignify the stain of violence? Sloan seems to suggest so, perhaps, by conceiving of Ophelia’s body as part of nature—indistinguishable from it.
(reviews)
This week, ACM is posting poetry every weekday.
wait, things improve, around every corner is a prize.
Let’s go back to that track and crush pine needles
with our heels. Crush our watches too.
(poetry)
This week, ACM is posting poetry every weekday.
See? I’ve been frank, while the TV keeps beaming images–you yelling at the cop dragging you away: Don’t take me away yet; but the cops keep manhandling you, smash your spectacles, your black skin shines with sweat.
(poetry)
This week, ACM is posting poetry every weekday.
I’d tell you to be careful, that everything here is lousy with history, from the first megafaunal
extinctions to those buffalo carcasses rotting in heaps after the last of our Transcontinental
massacres.
(poetry)
I’ve started thinking the worst of people. I wasn’t always like this. Can I keep doing this job? Why did I take the first one I found? Cause Mom just died and I couldn’t think straight? And minimum wage? Surely there is something better out there.
Inhabit your awareness. Breathe and scan throughout your body.(nonfiction)
The book, at its core, follows the speaker’s daily journeys along a rugged mountain road over the course of a year, with the gravel thoroughfare and its environs serving much the way Thoreau’s Walden Pond once did— fueling reflections on humanity in general, and the present moment more specifically.
(reviews)
This week, ACM is posting poetry every weekday.
even baby’s breath is weary and stale
in their nostrils falls the hail
the country’s black men sent to jail
(poetry)
Sudden understanding has snapped me from her side like a branch from a tree in strong wind.
(fiction)
Another Chicago Magazine 