Driving Range After the infestation, after we sprayed the apartment with chemicals smelling like gasoline and semen, we drove west. Allow...

the new doctor she looks up, the other guy he says here your wife’s spirit’s are pretty good, but her prognosis is poor, says you...

We established the Charles Simic Poetry Prize to honor our late friend and mentor. We received 357 submissions from around the world. The...

I was released into the wilderness, a penitent. I escaped back to civilization. I was captured and released at sea, a recalcitrant. I...

Crossbred I come from a long line of line-crossers—— poor mutts who left, looked for anyplace less harsh than the land that abandoned...

Learning Light’s Angles -For my Crane, Angela Luedke Can an arrangement of light be odd? Too many beams coming down at obtuse...

Early Gothic Tales The tintinnabulations of a brittle dog-eared book, a belfry, a bastion, a crypt with a clock like a mouth pried open...

Punctuation Many of those nights I felt like a parenthetical for your chants about our crowded with pins and nickels drawers, faded...

The Mercy Late night stun and no need to speak after the hospice call was the mercy. Morning sun like a fat raccoon in the tree, the moon...

They Year I Went Without Having Any Sense of Direction I dropped off my parents at the trailhead. They were very old. And underdressed....

10 Ways to Get to Chattanooga’s National Cemetery i. Cross Holtzclaw, pass the tracks, the gravel lot attended only by concrete blocks, a...

In the ICU 1 My sister has: diabetes, COVID, pneumonia, a staph infection. She has been intubated, then sedated and paralyzed so she...

The Reassuring Otherness of Ritual Roleplay On Founders’ Day we dress as dogs, squeezing into the old spots and patches, buckling on the...

As Ever No matter where I’d be, you found a way in. I dropped a tab as I drove, then waited for the last scrim to fall away, the freefall...

Other Fathers They’re floating out there, my string of stand-ins, understudies, minor characters and back ups. One father is a railroad...

Give Up Don’t Give Up was my brother’s advice three years after his doctor said six weeks My brother years earlier ahead of me on a path...

Bird of Evening Pippistrellus pippistrellus, family Vespertilionidae The rescued bat nestled, dark and resolute, eyes closed, slow heart...

Souvenir from the Victoria and Albert Museum The tile shows a harvester of grapes, his knife in hand among the vines, a young man with a...

Happy 149th Birthday Gertrude Stein, Gone 77 Years So, what is the Happy behind 149…what is the Happy? Why do we sing it? And where do...

Easter morning Early morning glows Bluish and pale In the window Rain so gentle The birds sing over it. My children sleep With smooth...