By Suchi Pritchard
To My Living Wife
By Sarah Anderson
I did not know how to be dead at the beginning. Someone came to tell you right before our child was born. The airplane crashing, the force, they must have said.
No sign of the plane, only a glistening Chesapeake Bay. You are too empty to forgive me. I shout at the asphalt the wheels never hit.
My love, a crippled animal hides itself, heals itself alone. I see you have joined the fog, chestnut tree, November. The branches have what they need. To forgive me, the water, the accident.
My great uncle served on the USS Intrepid and was chief experimental test pilot at Chance Vought Aircraft in the late 1940’s. He was killed flying an XF7U-1
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Bill
By C. Quintana
I named my inner critic Bill,
then he became my colleague
Sparkling grey eyes; salt-and-pepper hair—
Why are you here, Bill? Why are you hurting?
Across my desk in the ivory armchair—
Smile an inch from crying
I named my inner critic Bill
My inner critic Bill named I
I, Bill, inner named critic, my
Critic Bill named my inner I
The Riot
By Lily Nord
the Dudes pour lavender syrup you made by hand
into their tea with reckless abandon
say the Ito En you drink tastes like dirt
and I tap your leg- trade sushi rolls across the table laugh
at the top of their lungs pouring air into the tent
you and I, dead sober, are flying
four feet from the riot floating
behind our own heads
and I can see what you want in our mind’s eye:
ham and roast beef bitter cheese thick bread
but you watch us eat our rolls and curl up
under my shoulder
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TEN ALBUM COVERS
By Major Jackson
1.
The future is a nameless, blind piano man
fingering some groove out
of dead art from the Roman Empire.
2.
This summer, I did my best to forget
the moon, pale-faced traveler
of the skies, but remained a prisoner
to his dusty metaphors.
3.
When I can’t sleep,
I count all my likes.
4.
This morning I read Zagajewski
who recently vanished into a quantum
of light. I think I treasure most his clarity
which like my belief in art seems endless.
5.
On the kitchen counter, right now:
three sunflowers in a clear vase stretching
the day into a single filament of wonder.
6.
No one knows why sometimes
when reading a book, the face contorts
into a golden wildfire at night.
7.
What I am talking about is my funeral
where all the pallbearers are Yoruba priests passing
my body once again through a field of summer.
8.
The fate of the living is to abandon their accents,
our first instruments, then to return
home years later to retrieve them.
9.
Tack this up on your wall.
I want you to feel this energy,
cellphones smoldering
over a city.
10.
A fox is a suffering creature
fossilized in the fingers
of a piano player, exploding
into a feverish rift,
drowning God’s silence.