Billie Chernicoff Kimono 1. Refusal, acquiescence, travel. 10,000 hours to master the brush. 10,000 to master silence. A study of a sparrow, study of a moth. The sleeve, the arm. An hour to dress. 2. Ode to the nape of things. What can’t be seen even with two mirrors. 3. The Art of Washing the Kimono Undo the stitches. Drown each branch, blossom, cloud, mountain, stone, scroll, inkwell. Tell the river everything. Let it do its work. Sew again, finer. Save the old thread the still useful transient silk your mother taught you. Turn the ruined bird inside where…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Caroline Crumpacker End Road Concussive Event Car radio love song driving out past intention and singing the static between stations . I love you too, that one-trick pony of trying to have a girlhood an ambient refrain of head on porcelain. She is at the perfume hours and hours assembling a way of being a smothered creation repurposed as endless creation. That song is an assemblage of our abilities for repetition, an alliance between all the ways of being expressed as one attachment. We enter here: …
Betsy Fagin miraculous fishes surviving body feast days bosom ceiling already-formed tenderness the marvelously luminous genderfish fills their nets with the bell cure of souls not cranes of vigilance or safe-keeping, only ravens of heresy want knowns combust and survive dispersal {http://betsyfagin.com/}
Wendy Barnes Lament of the Swamp Hag I am not your paramour but made of your leavings, moss-haired, cypress-limbed and guts of chum and dogwood-chunked loam. This season turns you toward your fear, churning storms and waterspouts, the livid ocean squalls and dumps its entrails on the delta. I can read its plastic, glass, hubcaps, your errata spelling forth a ruptured past and a future we fall though and keep falling. I am the bog, the swamp, the marais, its big, meaty maw, selfsame. My nether aching never was for you nor tame, a kitchen garden waiting to oblige,…
Danielle Vogel from A Library of Light When I was small and still living with her, I wanted to write to all the dead people I had never met. I wanted to talk to those concentrations of energy I felt in the hallways of my house, my school’s stairwell, the damp corners of my yard. What I wanted to say couldn’t be arranged so I’d stay very still and reach my silence outward like a tactile glow, a static reaching to communicate with passing frequencies. Tonight, I’d like to write to a dead woman at the bottom of this ocean…
May Joseph Cricket Sounding Darkness March 5, 2016 An abandoned house with red tiled roof in decay rises across the small hill. It appears so much smaller, innocuous, from how I remember it. It is my mother’s childhood home in Quilt, Kerala. Once a sprawling home with a lush courtyard and the sounds of a large family, the crumbling ruin is now desolate, silent. Its melancholic aura betrays deep neglect. My mother stands with me outside the padlocked gates and murmurs in sadness that it is now filled with snakes, this place of her childhood, that she so…
Carol Mirakov kintsugi invisible irrelevant women having aged paralyzing animation of living & having lived ecstatic elastic disasters of time the perennial fuckable virgin apparition unlike animals we wince collapse bearing the seams of interconnectedness we should not be able to survive what we do amenable to chemical packages crows feet autocomplete surgery we having aged a cosmetic potential fill gold powder in patterns of biology to magnify lived pleasure & deference sparkling webbed faces flaunting biography molten angels who is walking tonight {http://www.archiveofthenow.org/authors/?i=61}
Review by Carole Mertz – Diane Lockward, author of The Crafty Poet: A Portable Workshop, has had poems featured in Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac and on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily. She is endorsed by Lee Upton, poet and professor of English at Lafayette College and by K.S. Byer, Poet Laureate of North Carolina, among others. In her fourth poetry collection, The Uneaten Carrots of Atonement, Lockward promises terror transformed into moments of beauty. I find that beauty rendered in various ways. First by the layout of the poems on the page. (“In My Bones” bears the shape of…
1. Take the first line of your Facebook news feed as the first line of your story. 2. Take a piece you’ve written and re-write it from a different point of view or perspective–perhaps a different character’s take on the same action, or just first person instead of third or present tense instead of past. 3. Try an acrostic! Write a phrase vertically on your paper (for example, Year of the Monkey). Use the letters of the phrase as the first letters for each line of your story. 4. Write a story about an animal, real or imaginary.
Janet Hamill – Synesthesia Surrealist poet and fiction writer Janet Hamill has adapted her poetry prompt for us. SYNAESTHESIA: THE SENSES AND THE ART OF IMAGERY Synesthesia – From the Greek, “perceive together.” The intermingling of sensations; sensing for example, of certain sounds through colors or ordors. Blending of sensations To write the poem/ prose poem/flash fiction, choose from the sheet a symbol/subject from section A, a verb from section B, and a sense from section C. In your poem you may use more than one item from each section. (Flash prompt is based on this poetry prompt–) Write…