Poetry

Erica Hoffmeister

Thus began a long period of acceptance: bone marrow nourishes
blood vessels, tortured anatomy, rehabilitation. How fingernails
keep growing after death. Bird’s beaks do the same thing. Can you hear them?
Flowing in both directions—I know this is impossible, but it happens. Often,
a dilation will occur when the insomniac beast wins the battle,
thundering hooves at night rippling under open windows. In waves,
the wind hits each branch one by …

Monica J. Claesson

Cross-legged on the hospital bed, you explain to me how every page
in your journal can be read like a palindrome and about the bridge
over the troubled waters of the river Styx and the human sacrifice
in the Shakespeare tragedy and the sunbeams in the R.E.M. music video
and the mermaid cats in the coloring book and the man in the movie
hanging posters on street corners and your …

E. Kristin Anderson

Eastern Horizon

The morning isolated        the water,
that ten o’clock eventually electrical
where the north gave birth to disaster.
And if we flash on a map,      looping
through home,

                        light fell from the forest,
sirens, birds, harlots     gone to windows
to watch. I slipped down and felt blood,
glittered all night, belly to the serpent,
midnight, the angel, the words.

                                                  I killed
atonement so glittering,     let’s pray on
hands and knees, heart a big red muscle
and earth would be      a …