Green at the End

The world outside had turned into a forest. She had not been out in weeks and had not known, but she was running out of all food, so she tied a camo tank top over her face and stepped out. It was quiet. She walked down the stairs and outside and into it: tall trees stepping into the sky, moss beginning patchily on the street like an early beard, small red beetles, decaying logs, mud and unknown puddles of water. The supermarket was a hothouse, flowers lining the shelves. There was a purple flower that she thought had risen up from the inside of the earth, exposing the inner, shivery part of earth, the fullest and most muscled part. She held out a hand to pick it but pulled back. She went home again to open all the windows, in case the flowers would grow in themselves, perhaps winding around the radiators, up the walls, the curtain rods, nesting in the cool dank space under the sofa and behind the refrigerator. She locked the door behind her so that they would stay inside, maybe, so the secret would not overflow into other apartments, though it was all over the world. She put her keys in her jacket pocket and left.

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Before The Move

We are in the floorboards here
I kneel down and lay my hands
On the old barnwood planks
Our first house—big step
Baby steps, first steps, dance steps

The big picture window where
I always beat the sunrise to the sofa
Pink tumbling over a sleeping mountain
A nursing baby at my breast
Another sun another son

We carved our traditions here
The turkeys and the pumpkin pie
The Christmases the Fourths of July
Birthdays, holidays—all holy days
Our rituals rooted in the seasons

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Tree Communion

I know a grave in the woods
tricked with running cedar, mulched
with hickory and storms, telling heaven
to dance cobble-rock and quail-feather,
tuning up the sprouts, and all the thaws,
so they smooth and wriggle, and they smooth
and bank up every skeleton against a ghost,
so they all sing, so they all remember names
that touch like the tallest willow’s shadow
cribbing across the face of an old woman
waiting to find me here at home and alive.

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Shark In Shallow Waters

How foreign-delicacy we must look
So glittering-feast for silver handcuffs like fish hooks
On the fishing lines of Met police
Our fleshy white meat
Scattered like bait in the woods

We all clenched-jaw, shark-teeth keys now
Double rows of razor-sharp between knuckles

Dragged up on the dock and weighed
Price gouged for market
Fish-eye frozen on a casket of ice
2.99/lb

What do we taste like?

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Clear Head

KG Newman is a 2012 Arizona State University graduate and sports writer for The Denver Post. His first two poetry collections, While Dreaming of Diamonds in Wintertime and Selfish Never Get Their Own, are available on Amazon. Clear Head We cancel our cells and cable just in time for summer and only keep the home […]

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Reservoir

Tom Mock‘s short fiction has been nominated for a 2018 Pushcart Prize, selected as a finalist in the 2012 Press 53 awards, and published by Menacing Hedge. Reservoir As you drift home in the dead of night in the back of a black cab, the road is as spare as the open ocean. It rises […]

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June, 4 Years Ago

I was looking at an old Moleskine and came across a “2 Line Journal” project I had done for June 2011. It looks like I wrote two sentences each day starting on the 5th, or that was the goal. I was in Maryland helping my family because my father had contracted life-threatening MRSA and was […]

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Leaving Paris

When I told my mom I’d decided to leave Paris and by extension the Louvre, the Canal St. Martin, the Marais, the amazing Chinese place with one-euro appetizers (carmelized lotus root! spicy green beans!) and move back to damp Normandy, she was not convinced. “Why would you want to leave Paris?” she asked, as though […]

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