Year: 2023
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Origin Stories – Joanne Durham
Garbage by Joanne Durham Creepy old guy’s digging through the garbage at 6:00 am— Bill complains on the locals’ page. Neighbors suggest he’s an artist, gathering tin to shape into tourist treasures, replace creepy with harmless, quiet, down on luck, vow to leave sorted cans along his route, even say his name. Bill retorts SO…
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Origin Stories – Kenton K. Yee
Metaphor Of A Muse by Kenton K. Yee The counterfeit is conceived on 14 point stock, sold, bought, received in a plain envelope, entered, dated, signed in Bic blue. How its front is flashed to prove. Truth be told, beauty isn’t proof. Still, the card almost achieves lamination of truth sequencing words like these in…
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Origin Stories – Annamaria Formichella
Numerology by Annamaria Formichella The word “quarantine” comes from Italian, quaranta giorni— forty days or the length of time a ship was held in isolation when suspected of carrying the plague. First spoken in fourteenth-century Venice and revisited six hundred plus years later. In 2020 quarantine and lent are coterminous, contemp- oraneous, collapsing and conflated.…
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Origin Stories – Alison Stone
Reverse Ghazal by Alison Stone (for B.) Secrets that lips hold back, the body shows. Be gone, Sun. In moonlight, the body glows. Rittenhouse sobs he shot in self-defense. Entry wound in the back, the body knows otherwise. The heart houses love, pumps blood. Is illness chance or debt the body owes? Top model insists…
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Origin Stories – Carol Deering
The Rio Grande Café by Carol Deering See the taco lady her ruby slippers hanging out one side of a papier-mâché taco, her arm bent over her eyes. She’s resting while the jukebox slides another oldie and the toy train roars around again. Each flash of light as the doors swing open, she’s off in…
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Origin Stories – Gloria Heffernan
Elegy for the Magi Trees by Gloria Heffernan I called them the Magi Trees since the first time I saw them. Three giant Norway Spruce just behind the rise of the drumlin beyond our backyard. Regal trees bearing wisdom and gifts. always on the verge of scaling that small hill, always on the brink of…
