A Clandesence of Angels

I live in the lavender gut of a horse, a beating heart just beyond the wall. And beyond that two old ladies sip tea on a white porch in the crabapple South, hoping for something that might squirrel up out of the ground, the age-old ground, the Southern ground, the ground at the top of a hill: a thin line of angels listening all boneless and hospitable from above, managing nothing with their tiny, modest, angel hands, hands that might just as well be days of the week. The long-gone Civil War is wearing a small red-and-gold cap once worn by an organ grinder’s monkey.

All the mournful songs

All the mournful songs They pick the finest days To play from the treetops Where the orioles whistle And dogs howl at the feet Wailing branches bridge Into dirges at sunset When I go out for a walk Along the shore – Saturnine sea sighing To my face as I gather Pebbles for a headstone. […]

My Melancholy Baby

Milton P. Ehrlich, Ph.D. is an 87-year-old psychologist and a veteran of the Korean War. He has published many poems in periodicals such as the London Grip, Arc Poetry Magazine, Descant Literary Magazine, Wisconsin Review, Taj Mahal Literary Journal, Antigonish Review, Ottawa Arts Review, Red Wheelbarrow, Huffington Post, Christian Science Monitor, and the New York […]

Stereometry | Root Expressions: Sadness as a fire √Alarm.

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 […]

In the Jungle

My mother is deep in her bed with her socks on, sticking out. She never wore socks, so I remember it surprised me. Her heels were always cracked, like mine are now, and though she perpetually tried to soften them, with creams and socks and special razors, in the summer they immediately toughened up, calloused […]

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