Vol. 8 No. 2

Fall 2025

under
Editor's Note
Soup
Everything is Burning
Spring in the Valley
This Place is Called The Body of Christ
the shape of things
The Transient Blessings of Nature I
Between This Scar and That Task
Creature of Habit
The Metaphorical Dog
Another Swim
Blue Hour
Compassionate Witness
Byd
In the Beginning
When the Swans Were Still With Us
The Transient Blessings of Nature IV
Keepsake
Suddenly, California
I Get Credit for Teaching You How to Bend Toward the Light
Red
Faustus in the Everglades
Colostrum
Olan Mills ’57
Golden Shovel with lines from Wislawa Szymborska’s "Landscape" trans. Clare Cavenagh
The Librarian
The Transient Blessings of Nature V
Poem That’s Really Just an Excuse to Tell You the Symptoms of Ovarian Cancer
Fall Sunset
Startipping
Incubations
Her Yellow Poncho
Everyone Signed my Godmother’s Card But Few Understood her Pain
Genocide’s Face
/
Break Maiden
The Yellow Voyager
"The challenge is to always find the ultimate in the ordinary horseshit..." James Tate
Crinoline
A Photo Series
Morning Ritual
refreshing
commune with the dead via voicemail
My Burden
On Asking God to Make You Something Else
Say Uncle
There’s No Such Thing as Fairies
Kindred Spirit Ablaze
In the Hot Spring Locker Room
Picasso, It’s Time to Sit Down & Talk Seriously
In another life
Dear Pinecone
The End of The Marriage
Party Time
Self-Portrait As Bearded Vulture Chick
Flamingo, Florida
UNTITLED oil on canvas 100 cm x 70 cm
rattlesnake/creek
untitled
elegy for a thirteen-hour road trip
Love Poem
October Prairie Metropolitan Blues
Brief Instructions for Unlearning
This Poem is a Message in a Bottle
Daydream
Catkin Moths
B-BOYS oil and cement on cd
Bees
Performance
Improv
Pot roast
Sky Omens
[when my daughter feels good about herself]
This Poem
Before the Arsonist
Between Kingdoms
I Remind Myself
Brief Rhapsody on Leisure
MI
Grace
The asphalt

I Get Credit for Teaching You How to Bend Toward the Light

after watching Episode 10 of Maid

When there isn’t an instruction book
on how to raise your mother, when her eyebrows
lose their ability to arch with emotion, when everything
you do ends in the crapper, there is always a hole, a crack
in the back of the sofa to accommodate your soul.

You will not stay there forever, or grow gills
behind your ears. Your epidermis will continue
to replace itself and the ducts at the corner of your eyes
will release tears to fall down your cheeks.

You will wake up and face all the monsters
who trip you up and make you wonder why you live.
Just when you feel the urge to jump into a fire,
you see your daughter’s smile, her bright blue eyes
that look like delicious blueberries. She will grab
your thumb with her tiny hand and squeeze it tight
in the middle of the night, and you will find
yourself totally absorbed in the most indescribable
love affair in the Universe. It will light your path
and lead you into a new morning.

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