After twenty years of postponing her love life and toiling as a professor of immunology at Cal Tech, Moonie finally has a breakthrough. She has been studying the humoral and cellular system of an earthworm named Carlos for fifteen years.
“Singing Worm,” by Marilyn Chin Read More »
The day has come when my mother
no longer knows me.
It comes on a day of dying
paperwhites, crumpled
like words torn from a typewriter.
“The Day Has Come When My Mother,” by Cathy Song Read More »
“I think the stomach must have gone to the dark goblins given grace far out in the groping tundras, and learned from them how to magically father the children of heat.”
“Blessings on the Stomach, the Body’s Inner Furnace,” by Robert Bly Read More »
Time stops. She’d moved
through the tall yellow sage
as they copulated,
stood only a few feet
away, enveloped in the scent
that drew them together.
“Eclogue at Twilight,” by Yusef Komunyakaa Read More »
In Los Angeles I grew up watching The Three Stooges,
The Little Rascals, Speed Racer, and the Godzilla movies,
those my mother called “Los Monstros,” and though I didn’t
yet speak English, I understood why such a creature would,
upon being woken up from its centuries-long slumber, rise
and destroy Tokyo’s buildings, cars, people–
“La Isla de Los Monstros,” by Virgil Suárez Read More »
A distended queen with hawthorn boughs, bonfires blazing
majusculed
Letters in the streets. She will go on watching them, upright &
inevitable.
“Inevitably, She Declined,” by Lucie Brock-Broido Read More »
Each week I pried stones from the frog, ran hands over fetlocks.
Gold palomino, black morgan, a huff and a cirrus
of steam. Winter mornings light
muscled its way through the whitewashed boards.
“Boys of My Youth,” by Charlotte Boulay Read More »
He’s brown-eyed and big: six-foot three, two-thirty or so, and running a little to fat, which I never liked in a man but didn’t much mind in him. He has beautiful hands, and a smile that says everything’s easy. And although he’s only twenty-eight, not much older than me, he has a wife and three kids and a beat-up car with a baby-seat in the back. He has responsibilities.
“Here at the Starlight Motel,” by Andrea Barrett Read More »
She thinks of the lost possibilities,
the one that remains hidden in the grass
unnamed by yearned for —
the idea of a bright one,
stranded,
star-gazer, poet, mathematician.
“Vasectomy,” by Cathy Song Read More »
About the horses,
oh, do not ask me
how they live or what
their lives center on.
“About the Horses,” by Mark Halperin Read More »
