Year: 2023
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Origin Stories – Alfred Fournier
Warning! by Alfred Fournier Do not feed honey to infants under one year. They may give up the breast. They might sprout mandibles and gnaw the crib rail restlessly, fly from the window with a craving for wildflowers and forsake human form. And who can blame them? Distillation of floral nectar gathered in a million…
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Origin Stories – Gloria Parker
Pet by Gloria Parker You bring her home, give her a bell and collar– a litter box—a name you think she’ll answer to. For your amusement, the stripy little wildcat stalks the rooms of your house under its aging roof, till one day—maybe she’s at a window, licking a paw, when her whiskers twitch and…
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Origin Stories – Jonathan Yungkans
Duplex Beginning with a Line by Paul Vangelisti* by Jonathan Yungkans The progress of remorse and dripping faucets deepens a sharp-edged furrow between rocks on anxiety’s edge. eroding my neighbor. My neighbor’s forehead is where grass bleeds. It’s his clue I’m wasting hemoglobin, to be more diligent on sprinkler heads— leaky sprinklers an overbearing, offensive…
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Origin Stories – Nancy Botkin
Icelandic by Nancy Botkin I’m down on my knees scraping paint off the floor with my thumbnail, washing my hands over and over, but it’s like trying to get blunt force trauma and strangulation out of the news. I went back and forth between Icelandic and Moonmist, colors suggesting cool and distant, colors with blue…
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Origin Stories – Julie Weiss
Poem Written in the Eight Seconds I Lost Sight of My Children by Julie Weiss Listen, the rain is slicing limbs off the sky´s body. The body is being dragged under a carpet of reflections. The air swells with last breaths. With the sour aftertaste of goodbyes. Today is as good a day as any…
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Origin Stories – Judy Kronenfeld
Musical Surprise by Judy Kronenfeld All through the klezmer concert at the synagogue, all through the wailing, laughing, talk-back violin, the clarinet cavorting and kazatski-ing, and climbing up to cry from the rooftops, the cymbals shushing and tsk-ing, the sax keening and weeping its ecstasy of prayer, my dead father and mother sit down beside…
