Vol. 6 No. 4

Spring 2024

Bag
Editor's Note
Anniversary
Borrowed Dream
At Dan's Wake
Birdhouse
I Bring You Home
Flicker
For All the Ways We Do Not Touch
Pigeon Slay
Ode to Orange
A Three-Legged Dog on a Christmas Card
The Boat
The Tree Guy
Pigeon Face
It’s Winter Now, The Fish is Dead
Apples
Piñata Nights
About as Close as My Husband’s Ever Going to Get to a Love Poem
Birdhouse in Light
Familiar
Holding On
White Dragon
Cough
Pearl
I Wake Up to My Dog Gnawing
The water at Camp Lejeune
Princess and Stars
Boyhood
Pathophysiology
I Dreamed Us in A Rocketship
Bird
Duplex
i dreamt i gave birth to the opossum in my backyard
What Comes To Hand
Dream-Inducing Dragon
Red Circles
Río Paraná
The Launch We Carry
Two Dragons
Butterflies
A Teaspoon of Soil
Plum Rain
No Pity for My Scorched Lips
Her therapist told her to write her dead father a letter
Scissoring
A Request of My Lips
You Will Find No Place Like Your Heart
Names of Black Birds (IV)
Post Mortem
Duh
Chanting Kaddish for My Estranged Father
Her Chickens
Living is a form of not being sure*
Cavalier Sally
My Best Friend in Kindergarten
Olenka
Hosed
Velma and Willie
Code-Switching, a sonnet
Lately, certain months decline their customary duty
Jack O’Lantern
NuNu's Dream
this is not the thrill i was promised
WHAT HAPPENED WHEN THEY RETURNED TO THE HOUSE AFTER THE WAR
The Anorexic Conservationist
Opaque Red Crystal Oxidized
When I enter a place where I am to stay
A Premonition While Looking at ‘Ambulance Call’ by Jacob Lawrence
Best Wishes for the Expectant Mother

Names of Black Birds (IV)

That we speak in different ways
about different things says a lot.
The Redwings in the mountain ash
use asterisks to ask questions
about where next to find berries
or which star to follow on which
night. Cowbirds pretend to join in.
European starlings, Shakespeare’s
darlings, know that to sing or not
to sing isn’t an option. Crows
know this. They croak and crawl across
the sky to a rhythm their wings
make. How Grackles first occupy
the trees and why is not what I
need to know but when the morning
sun will come and break up the night
in forms of black birds taking flight.

Share!