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...

Mercedes Lawry The hungry who cling to the side of bleak mountains, their stories carried by black birds whose cries are empty of promise. The pale-faced couple, in the midst of a swamp, too old to start again, too tired. The small child in a bed, bald, with epic eyes. The continuum collapses into measures of time, each hour holy in its unfolding, each minute a shallow breath. At the perimeter, the onlookers gaze, curious, a little...

Mercedes Lawry I grow halfway into the gluttonous sun. Gold nimbus gives false protection, but I’m content to glory in the reach. I would be a blazing hand surprising the gulls as I forsake roots and reason, sip greedily at light, nerves firing, little flames all along my skin. Mercedes Lawry has published poetry in such journals as Poetry, Rhino, Nimrod, Poetry East, Seattle Review, and others. She’s also published fiction and...

Mercedes Lawry The Modigliani women come to me in half dream, offering comfort. Without brittle words or lies. Sorrow knows sorrow in the tracery of bones. The hands of the pianist are young birds and hungry. Music melds with the elements of a body in motion. And in repose, a flattery of death, which I have watched and can tell you, is an ugly ruckus. Mercedes Lawry has published poetry in such journals as Poetry, Rhino, Nimrod,...

John W. Evans Only a handful made it to the United States, some as far as Detroit. One killed a Sunday school teacher walking students through the Oregon woods. However many became rumor, stuck on power lines near missile silos, cut into tarps by farmers or chased across the desert with rifles and pickups, only seen or heard after the fact of arrival turned cloud to bulb and flame, morning and empty field, it seemed unjust they might...

John W. Evans Every stick-figure boy stuck under pews smiles, from low angles, looking up. Kind of evil, eagerly lost or found, the struck boy slinks past the sacristy, under the glass, out of earshot of the choir. Wrapped in pale silk, shook foil flowers the cross, iridescent, lemon-oiled. The boy shrugs heaven and sky, soil to pole. Yards down which he longs to roll: green in summer, green in winter. Glory the Lord. John W....

Our May Issue features two new poems by Patty Seyburn, including, "What Is Best."

Michael T. Young I used to read while nestled in a crook of maple branches, or seated on a slab of concrete that jutted into lake water, striders coasting the rumpled sheets. Reeds on the far shore needled the shallows writing a subtext into palms of sunlight alluding to trout and bass tunneling the deep, to the early alphabets of mud and rock. Mallards skirred the surface by day, bats skimmed it by night, their wings scratching brief...

Jaydn DeWald This village is even dreamier than the original. Who, for instance, would reproduce the old snakelike impressions of our bodies In the amber grass, or reenact us, in a thunderstorm, flinging our undergarments From a cliff? It was lifetimes ago, those times. Now we cast no shadow over the plucked swans, and are left to sleep in corners Like a mound of coats. The path to our rowboat is even narrower, dustier; gnats Blot out...