BY CARLA PANCIERA “I remember that cow,” my nephew says. “She’s the one we pulled out of the mud with the tractor.” “No,” I say. “She got stuck in a tree.” “The one who got electrocuted from her water bowl?” “Different cow.” “The crazy one who dropped dead in the milking parlor? Heart attack?” I … Continue reading AFTER MY NEPHEW READS MY POEM ABOUT THE COW WHO GOT STUCK IN A TREE
Category: Poetry
IN DISCOVERY PARK
BY SONIA GREENFIELD The hummingbird follows me through the park and it takes a certain ear to hear her. You say you wish I lived more in my body. If you call me light-boned, I’ll try. Grass fields and tree patches roll down to the water in a palette of wheat tones, and the water … Continue reading IN DISCOVERY PARK
GAINSBOROUGH PAINTS MAN INTO ROCKS
BY SETH ABRAMSON The only way to paint a boulder in the surf is as though it were alive: cooling the moving flesh with colorlessness, then down to its verb, then evolving to an unknown beauty in the reeds, where its remarkable lifetime may be no more than that thing—which could stand for anything—we catch … Continue reading GAINSBOROUGH PAINTS MAN INTO ROCKS
MY SON THE HOUDINI
BY JOHN C. MORRISON After breakfast I chain his wrists, ankles, lift and lay him in a casket, kiss his forehead, padlock and plunge the heavy box into the icy river. A minute later, I panic peel away shoes to dive in and he rises soaked, shivering and beaming on the rocky shore of the … Continue reading MY SON THE HOUDINI
DEGAS’ HORSES
BY DEBORAH CASILLAS Degas’ horses were wrong at first. At a gallop the legs blurred beyond the eye’s seeing. Even Gericault painted them bounding like a deer. It was only prancing, rearing, walking, that the artists got right. Then Muybridge made his photographs, a series of cameras clicking as the horse passed so the exact … Continue reading DEGAS’ HORSES
TARRTHAIL!
BY DENISE DUHAMEL Paul said, “It was John’s idea to call the movie Help! And I think from the things he said, that was his state of mind at the time.” The movie was originally going to be called Eight Arms to Hold You which is also a plausible name for a Beatles movie. The … Continue reading TARRTHAIL!
SAPPHO ON THE EDGE OF THE BAYOU
BY ANNA JOURNEY Coughed up the jazz band’s brass throats, weddings are a hollow music pressed thickly around curls of the wrought iron gate, the cast solid magnolia. There is rust coppering down the fine edges of everything here in this violet light—the white pickup’s eaten paint, rose ash of cinderblocks, the one cool sting … Continue reading SAPPHO ON THE EDGE OF THE BAYOU
