BY LILAH HEGNAUER

(for Karen)

Tell me the story again,                             how you made another body of your own and kept him well & here. Imagine: his enormous leather mittens, still filled. Bucket crowded                              with unwashed russet potatoes. Loss is a far cry from utterly unhinged, just me and my lattice windows. …MORE

BY GREGORY SHERL

Mel Gibson is a thundercloud. He formed somewhere over the Midwest, a few years after World War II. They say he emigrated from Australia, a son of prisoners surrounded by water—that they hated the dryness, but what to do? Mel found Catholicism in an unplugged fan. Me, I was born in a billboard. A wave came, the billboard stood. I washed up close to the last place she slept. I smelled cherry blossoms, found bristles from an old toothbrush. The truth about Mel Gibson is that his heart is every drug-free commercial. This is Mel Gibson’s heart when he looks at your olive skin: a frying pan against glass bowls. In the summer you can sleep above the thinnest sheets, eat chilled soup & still sweat from the neck. I have thought about touching every person who looks at me but doesn’t look away. The satisfaction …MORE