In the midst of slicing onions, the poet Receives a message from her Kitchen Witch In almost-iambic-pentameter. Anxiously she searches for paper and pencil Before the elusive language Falls away like the peel. While she scribbles a furious shorthand, A…
Summer already and too hot, time for movement, blowing left or right even, if forward is too much to ask, hips shifting, knees flexed like basketball players, ankle-breakers, fast and then gone, a going somewhere, not just out, but an…
When I come upstate in your third trimester, we take fetch-crazy Otis for a walk; the centimeter gained each week makes you the ball that O runs after. And I feel Ruby cause a quake along the equator of your…
My Face, My Face After so long I couldn’t decide whether it was age making me uglier or thick hair swamping my features so I drove 30 miles once, twice, three times to my hairdresser, but it wasn’t any better…
Oblong in air catapulted into somersault You landed in arms ready to wash the blood from your journey. sniffing me furry without hair My voice no longer an echo. L. B. Williams is the author of the memoir, Letters to…
The message comes toward the end of a long Saint Joan run, my daughter’s final performance in the title role— when we get back late that night the light on our machine flashes like a Broadway Marquee and my brother…
The thin girl burns calories lifting hangers from the shopping rack, hungry as anyone for a bargain. She is not obsessed with her waist or the way her stomach laces her hips together like a rope bridge bent beneath the…
Fishing without a fishing pole is feeling vibration and tug is like playing a harp with the fingers rather than the nails feel the strings as they tighten, loosen feel the nibble at the other end and tug on the…
Life begins in water. Here, on the gravel beach, where the shifting tides rock clattering pebbles forward and back in their arms, and the murmuring sea whispers lullabies in our ears, I watched you. You were silver and grey like…
Hand tempera paintings of New York City sewer systems, an unripe plum, mass of potential cells, bundled and bursting to expand, mitosis ready, to form organs and limbs. Paintings of flowers, and empty soil beds swollen breasts, remembering peri-bottles, the…
Like the memory deepest hidden, it drives you The you you can’t put down make sleep smother under logic The pilot light inside burning away the shapes and masks that sell you this story– a spinning web of deja vus…
transfer, held damply in her hand, the snow melting where her cap (nearly) met her coat, her scarf left where (behind), shed like the skin of a snake, useless as an escape tool, however jauntily it was wrapped, the pantone…