She takes the test on her birthday.
“You’ll want a baby right away, won’t you?” he’d joked three months earlier, before their August wedding.
She’d demurred, but she knew she was lying. By November, there it is: a growth, a …
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Features
There are diamonds inside
Although the Leonid meteor shower is not a rare occurrence, it is rare that I will be awake to see it. The news has been reporting that the meteor shower is coming, that a certain province …
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Special Feature 2
Surrounded by Peach Trees, President Clinton Speaks to My Fourth Grade Class [2020 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize Featured Finalist]
Back to School Day and my sister has been dead one year, ten months. This is how you get to the other side. We’ve been moving into a new world. When pressed against
your palm, the flesh of a good …
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Is man no more than this?
—King Lear
From twelve floors up, looking across the roofs,
we get a glimpse of Jersey, glimpse of Hudson,
evening sky. Window wide open. Breeze.
My folks—my mother’s ninety-three and blind,
my father’s …
Special Feature 2
far past the beginning and quite close to the end [2020 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize Featured Finalist]
before revealing the rabbit, after she reaches into you
like the magician into the hat, the will
of touch descending into night, past the stain
-ed mural against the brick, past any tulip or fallen
rose, the lesser pleasures—no, further, …
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Special Feature 2
Transcript of My Mother’s Sleeptalk: Chincoteague [2020 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize Winner]
Was not a one-trick pony.
Was the trick of many ponies.
Was the trick of swimming
The ponies from the island
To the mainland. So as not
To burden the island, said
The saltwater cowboys whose
Trick it was …
Then Creole stepped forward [on the bass] to remind them that what they were playing was the blues. . . . He began to tell us what the blues were all about. They were not about anything very new. He …
Read MoreSoon after he came home to Arkansas,
mother’s cousin Larry became a stone on a hill.
She tells of the monkey leashed
and taught to ride his shoulder
as he walked the couple blocks to Main
when they were young, …
Poetry
It’s Like This I Told the Archangel; Fabulous Outrageous Termite Mounds; & Trees Line the Road Into
It’s Like This I Told the Archangel
who can’t swim—
crazy crowded under great waters
two hours from shore and so misleading dull vast gray not even blue if you
look from the boat a great nothing really except …
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