Lesson Here’s where you work. On this table the chisels lie. Twenty-six. Some have grown blunt with the efforts of carvers before you. In time, tools fail. You work in stone. Cutting on the bias, you strike imperceptibly until something gives. Maybe the stone cries. Once there was lymph, slightly aquamarine. On this bench rests […]
Read more "Lesson"Spring Laying in the long grass I am on the frontier! Thumbing my way Through the old growth forest On the banks of the Allagash The whisper of the wind Feels like an ocean I spot a cloud shaped Like the old homestead I am lost In the North Country Swarmed in a psychosis of […]
Read more "Spring"The resemblance another existential morning and I’m having a coffee peering through the blinds at the chittering sparrows surveying the camellia bush at the centre of my lawn which the gardener has shaped into a giant ball dotted with blooms pink buds quivering like sea-anemone in the mild April breeze then it strikes me in […]
Read more "The resemblance"August Garden Overgrown, ravaged with insects, humming incessant sun, the lot of it buckles, sucks, sags and slumps toward autumn — all bursting, come to fruition, seeking divisions between sex and sex and death — breathing last breaths, heaving its seed toward next season. Stephen Jackson [he/him] lives and writes in the Pacific Northwest. His […]
Read more "August Garden"Prescience The sky’s a graveyard full of ghosts and fossils. No one’s dared to bury barley; it hasn’t rained in thirty days. Neither almanac nor bible tells how to predict an ending. I thought I understood the lifespan of a star, but I was wrong: their deaths are expanding, infinite; I’m the thing inconsequential, impermanent. […]
Read more "Prescience"September This month cuts its own hair, the trees’ dream of going bald and old roses sport candelabras. The mosses cannot hold on as tightly as they did in June. The forsythia droops like a girl’s braids at the end of the first day of school. Black-eyed Susans flirt over the heads of dead-headed daisies. […]
Read more "September"Noting the Excessives We are the feeble, living on an oily, zit faced, nicotine stained bowling ball, the one spinning and hurling in the gut of a steel cobalt blue sky. We are the jolly simpletons stuck babysitting ourselves with the keys to the asylum tucked neatly beneath our slick and lying tongues. We are […]
Read more "Noting the Excessives"Unstoppable The silence fills the crowded hall The warlord standing tall As prisons swell and graveyards sprawl The people hear his call The peasants, merchants, nobles all To please, make themselves small Save one who looks on high and cries “This tyrant’s reign must fall!” Randy Lee is a graduate student at the University of […]
Read more "Unstoppable"The Ballerina’s Tale Each night inside that dead-end bar on the same stool without fail, she’d wait until the jukebox played “A Whiter Shade of Pale.” Those barroom gallants jeered as they quickly gathered around, to cheer each time she’d pirouette until she tumbled down. While from a corner booth, dead set, his bloodred eyes […]
Read more "The Ballerina’s Tale"Williams I stole a book or two in my time— from a room where it bided unread winter and winter came Williams, came that greeny asphodel; unknown then to me in my darkness, how it bloomed when I brought it out, modestly, continuously, met me long years away with waves of renewed waking, a kind […]
Read more "Williams"
Visitant 