Julie Sheehan He has placed before you fire and water; stretch out your hand for whichever you choose. Sirach 15:16 Can it be thrift when math necessitates you choose between power or a timer belt? A car can run on hope, but LIPA dealt its inky cut-off notice: thrift dictates more making-do. Thus should we celebrate your television-watching, latch-key kids, who’ve never had a latch, much less a gate, for saving you sitters. You took...

Julie Sheehan Girls, boost your confidence. The competition’s fierce. If you don’t glisten, You’ll never have a chance. My next pet peeve is leave the pre-Madonna Attitude at home! You wanna win, but not by stepping on another girl. It bares repeating: keep your social morays clean. Be curtious! Who cares Your sister’s fat and inappropriate? Freestyle rap’s a talent that beauty judges probably would hate. No holes barred, and...

Patty Seyburn You should have known I’d return. My letters to you always embraced the left margin, the page’s West where the golden apples grew – yes, yes, those same apples Atalanta gathered up while she ran against her suitor, Hippomenes and in losing, poor virgin, lost herself to marriage. I am a better loser: a mediocre huntress, at best, at ease with chronology – step, step – one leads to the next. In the tick-tock...

Michael Tyrell Almost spring, & our dictator’s new order: everyone in our country must French-kiss the frozen utility poles— the boulevards become maypoles of muffled wailing, move too much & you lose the mind, to keep the tongue & the mind pick a word to keep in your mind, blunt like starve or trowel or cudgel, say it will be coming up crocuses soon those clouds not the shoulders of ice-storms,...

Brandon Lewis That is how the last buffalo herd is culled. I read on, spilling drops of tea on the news page, letters darkened in spots. Across the road, a tree I can’t name buds red. To squint at its branch spellings, to iterate its Latin root does not tell the story quite. Time to relearn spring— clover leaf or cherry blossom, what arrives at first blush and second. And then the herds returning each season. Rangers say they...

His stunning collection "Devotions" has been nominated for both this year's National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award; this month, we're honored to debut four new poems from Bruce Smith's latest series, "Thinly Sealed," supplemented with readings by the poet.

The Pulitzer Prize finalist and Harper Lee Award-winning poet reads and discusses his work.

Jonathan Wells Not just a crack but a chasm in the floor Not just a room but a helix of rooms Not a hall to follow but a hallucination of halls Nor a load-bearing wall but the Great Wall of China Not one mountain between us but a range of mountains Not one sea but generations of seas Not just the harbor of Harbortown but the Gulf of Aqaba Not just bread to share but flour and salt Not a cold mug but a mortuary of teacups Not the...

Jonathan Wells Dogs fetch an unthrown ball and children smash softly together. Finches twitch in the upper branches, antennas for the soul of winter. I lie down rib by rib across the sled’s hard slats and kick into the terror of the hill. The horizon ridge holds out an unstirred cup of gray. Words I’d nurtured surge past me, faces, situations. The glow beneath what’s spoken ravishes like an orchid blossom on a browning stalk. My...

John M. Anderson That world was the ivory v, flush with the basketball floor of the pinball machine—I could open a door. The landscape was painted in that Bad Day at Black Rock matinee poster style with counters ringing tens of thousands of points with the same springing bell sound the Esso gas pumps made all the way to L.A. My father would have found a percentage in the way half of the quark’s globe spins backward in time,...