Origin Stories – Oisín Breen

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

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

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

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 […]