BY RYAN TEITMAN

When our eyes can’t adjust
to the fog of late light burning

off under a heat of darkness,
a black flower blooms

for a single minute,
and the bees waiting for its nectar

die of thirst. They drop one by one
into a furry pile around the stem,

not knowing that the scarcity
of its opening fails to make the juice

any sweeter. We lie when we think
that the rare and the sacred

are like twin, unborn colts—legs tangled
as they float in the barrel

of their mother’s belly. A girl keeps
a halved pear in a jar by her bedside

and says that it’s her dead puppy’s ear,
so everyone believes her

when she kisses the glass container
goodnight, and carries it on walks

around the neighborhood. You can learn
the most horrible things, if you listen

in the moment between night and day.
I would name that moment, but to name it

would make it grow, would give old women
the leisure to kneel at the altar and light

candle …MORE

BY RITA MAE REESE

The word is the making of the world.
Wallace Stevens

It’s a filmstrip afternoon
           and we’re all grateful
to the humming projector
           in the middle of our desks,
the closed blinds, the absence of a real adult.

There’s a vague promise of revelation
           from the title
and the dark, tree-lined streets, the voice
           calling from a house
carrying within it our freedom not to answer.

Inside another house, a little girl in a pretty dress
           is falling asleep
at her father’s desk, turning into
           Alice in Wonderland
as her mind falls down the rabbit holes of grammar.

The Madhatter and Jabberwocky
           tell her to lure
the letters into a trap so they can beat them
           to death with mallets.
We’d like to see that. Without words

no one could tell us what to do.
           We know grammar is just a byproduct,
like schizophrenia, of a brain that grew
           too fast for its own good
and that history is a series of conspiracies

by accidental despots. Mrs. Bradford is
           falling asleep on the …MORE

BY LIZZIE HUTTON

At 28 I saw that my flat flowered ring had cracked.
          At 35: spring’s slaughter house. The old
                    stone house, its wild kept food.

They told me it was made of rose gold, how I liked
          the name. Furred poppy stems and jagged leaves
                    persisting from the white-washed cracks.

That “rose” more real to me than just plain
          gold, although the jewelers told me—
                    weeds, they nodded in their place

Their open-faced red heads—that mine was of a type
          once common, inexpensive. My boy glued there
                    to see the baby pigs released, swell down the hill

To forage on their short blunt freckled legs for fallen nuts.
          A “cigar ring” they called it, made of giant
                    sheets of heated gold.

Even so, the sloping pebbled road was beautiful
          at night. The wallpaper designs were rolled on
                    in repeating frames. I couldn’t tell, though, if

Their squeals were greedy grunts or pained—then
          machine-sliced and cut to size, formed into rings
                    and put to harden—even wondered if it was themselves

They ever ate—like cannoli shells on slender …MORE

BY BARBARA CLAIRE FREEMAN

If now you cannot hear me it is because we are breaking up because
our borders are not secure because the iPod interferes with your pace

maker because there is no reason to worry about the past when the past
may never come because no one else will remember how damp

the page smells after the network goes offline. One day you will forget
the law of flood, you will take it back while the speaker behind the mirror

leads you further away from lines that began with first person address:
“let the forgetting begin.” If now you cannot read him it is because distance

is what you lost once and now must drink. It is almost dark and the wind
off the river proves a field for knots of clumsy and impenetrable English

confronting the translator of Persian lyric poetry their stanzas having
become an abandoned house awaiting foreclosure as evidence

of the decade’s debacle …MORE

BY JESSICA LOVE

My brother won’t eat the Costco strawberries,
twenty giant strawberries in a carton the length
of a twelve-pack. He sips his Coke and shakes
his curly head. Not cool, he says. I’ve seen
apples smaller than those berries. We watch the storm
together, at Mom’s new place, watch as it turns from
bluster to bite like a violent drunk slowly
waking up. We lean against the couch
and look out onto the deck. Mud sloshes
down the flowerpots. And then a hearty sheet
of water falls against the glass and we can see
nothing but colors blurred together. It is how
I imagine an impressionist depicting Spring but I
am no art major. Museum junky, yes. This morning
I studied every Mondrian on the wall while my brother,
inspired by the abstraction, scribbled plans
for a carbon-neutral house party. I wouldn’t be invited,
he informed me. I lived too far away. Win some,
lose some, he said as if he owned composure,
and I let him. …MORE

BY JIM TILLEY

          With a Mozart concerto in the background
and little to do as I waited for the next available associate
          to be with me shortly, I began to comprehend
how one infinity can be larger than another,
          not in the sense of the mathematician
who can prove that rational numbers are countable
          and real numbers are not, but my patience,
which I am continually thanked for,
          the next available associate undoubtedly

unaware of my infinite fascination with Mona Lisa’s
          excised eye staring upside down
from the minute hand, obliterating the smile at half past
          the hour, according to the artisanal timepiece
my wife brought back from Florence last year.
          A larger infinity is what my neighbor’s cow
exhibits every day lying near the split-rail fence,
          alone with her thoughts as the cars speed by.
Today, she was watching the sky clear

          after an early morning rain that Constable
would have captured in a pastoral scene,
          though the cars would have been horses,
and they would likely have been grazing …MORE

BY KC TROMMER

For A. H.

The brain is three pounds of soft mass. It’s the consistency
of pudding, one doctor told me, which put me off
pudding afterwards. He gestured, motion of the finger
going through it, and even made the wet sound
for something—the knife?—sliding in. Easy to make a mistake.

They worked in the most primitive part of the brain,
the area that governs pleasure. And because
it was the brain, they kept me awake for surgery.
I didn’t know—they hadn’t told me—what would happen when
they took their instruments in to pry the tumor
away from where it nestled against the base of my skull.

When they were close, they leaned in, hovering, faces taut
in anticipation of the glorious moment and so it came:

a soft touch to the reptilian brain and delight sprung out,
shooting my body with ecstasies. I shook the table, silver metal
of their instruments tittering as my eyes rolled …MORE