Year: 2023

  • Origin Stories – Karen Paul Holmes

    Origin Stories – Karen Paul Holmes

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    by

    Constance Brewer
    in

    So, Supposedly, We Each Have an Angel Over One Shoulder by Karen Paul Holmes But the thing is, we have to ask for help. Until we ask, the angel just has to sit or float there, filing its nails, plucking out loose wing feathers, bored silly watching the soap opera of our lives. When we…

  • Origin Stories – Jennifer Schomburg Kanke

    Origin Stories – Jennifer Schomburg Kanke

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    by

    Constance Brewer
    in

    Salvia, Reblooming by Jennifer Schomburg Kanke Speak to me of love and I will speak to you of salvia bought on sale, twenty-cents, an end of the season find. The man said bloomless shafts weren’t worth the dirt. Forget to water, leave bare on chilly nights. Speak to me of love and I will tell…

  • Origin Stories – Oisín Breen

    Origin Stories – Oisín Breen

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    by

    Constance Brewer
    in

    Origin Stories – the Kingfisher The poem, the Kingfisher, is an off-cut, of a kind, reconfigured to stand apart, from my current major work-in-progress. Its genesis lies in slowly building out the world in which the greater work’s narrator struggles between sensuality and an absurdly fanatical religious devotion, and in each object on the island…

  • Origin Stories – James Penha

    Origin Stories – James Penha

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    by

    Constance Brewer
    in

    Cows by James Penha The cows in the field lumber from patch to patch of grass and weeds; mouths pull and chew and swallow and cuddle with an eagerness their big brown bodies belie. Contented—as those dairy bovines who produced Carnation Condensed Milk had been advertised for decades—cows need not run. They amble. They lumber.…

  • Origin Stories – Laurie Rosen

    Origin Stories – Laurie Rosen

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    by

    Constance Brewer
    in

    Slow Flow Lava by Laurie Rosen When he asked, I didn’t say yes right away, fearing myself embedded like a xenolith, bits and pieces torn off, trapped in his magma, thwarted from traveling my own journey. And for years it seemed so. Traces of me wiped away, my core weakened — spun off-course, momentarily interrupted…

  • Origin Stories – Robbi Nester

    Origin Stories – Robbi Nester

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    by

    Constance Brewer
    in

    Worst Fear by Robbi Nester Halfway through the revolving door of prose, I see Poetry disappearing into a crowd. It happens in the old Wanamakers department store on Market Street, in Philadelphia, long since closed. While I am stalled by the throng, she slips smoothly by, in her neat summer frock, and enters the gilded…