September Again

This month of your birth
has crept in upon me again,
slipped over the window sill
and into the corner of my room
where a perfect square of moonlight
seems to have up taken residence
and, outside, where the birds,
a whole choir of them, whose names
you never bothered to learn even when
mother recited them over and over again
as she pointed to the secret places
she thought they were hiding
under eaves or in the tangled branches,
are singing their hearts out
as she would always say then
and where now the boisterous cicadas
are joining in that twilight overture

Little Town

Little Town Money almost enough.Sanity but not quite.Mellow mostly.Bowel movements plentiful.Hunger at times.Pain where expected.Growls and groans,grins and laughter,in proportion.Lambs and lions,about 50-50.Much more copperthan gold.Sex and sickness.Holiness and one barber’s pole.Hardware store.Movie house.Tractors – second hand.But much machineryin general.More than booksand places for a band to play.Scant art.Little style.A lot of unmarried virgins.A few […]

Lesson

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 […]

Twin Fins

Below is the final Part 23 of 23 monthly installments for Visitant. ◄◄ Read the prologue / introduction: Meet Agnes Person ◄ Read the previous installment | Cold Turkey Twin Fins Silver Supper, a singles prayer group, calls to remind Agnes about the Advent prayer list, but no person, her message machine answers in Bea’s voice, is […]

Woman Wants to Have the First Baby Born on Mars

Laura Sobbott Ross is a widely published award-winning poet whose work has appeared in more than 100 literary journals. In addition to four Pushcart Prize nominations, she was a finalist for the Art & Letters Poetry Prize and won the Southern Humanities Auburn Witness Poetry Prize. She has published two chapbooks, A Tiny Hunger and […]

Salva Animam Meam

Annie Blake is an Australian writer, thinker and researcher. She is a wife and mother of five children. She started school as an EAL student and was raised and, continues to live in a multicultural and industrial location in the West of Melbourne. Her main interests include psychoanalysis and metaphysics. She is currently focusing on in medias res […]

Back From The Dead

Back From The Dead I wait, patient as leaves. You like to speak of pleasant topics, & keep the thicket of the heart unmentioned. My breasts have changed, their fullest moment wasted. We will have to make our peace, me & the skeleton, me & the hourglass. I cracked the ice, a blow that brought […]

Stereometry | Root Expressions: Tell me the story √Of how I was born.

Mercedes Lucero is the author of the chapbook In the Garden of Broken Things (Flutter Press 2016) and winner of the Langston Hughes Creative Writing Award for Poetry. Her writing has appeared in New Orleans Review, Curbside Splendor, Paper Darts, The Chicago Tribune’s Printers Row Journal, The Pinch, Heavy Feather Review, and Whitefish Review among others. She is a recent Glimmer Train “Short Fiction Award” Finalist […]

Back in the Day(s)

In the first three weeks, I would wake up (though to say wake up you would think I had been sleeping, when, in fact, I probably had just put my head to the pillow) and my eyes felt like sandpaper. My body ached, and I just felt dirty, no matter how many showers I took, […]

To The Top

My mother always told me when I came out of the womb I tried to emerge upside down and ass-end first. Posterior, facing the wrong way up and Frank breech, like a folding chair or a backwards diver in pike position dropping out of the safe water and into the high, bright world. Once they […]