Edith told her husband she was leaving him and moving back to America. He was standing in the bathroom, a towel wrapped around his waist, shaving cream lathering his cheeks. His back muscles twitched when she said it, but otherwise he didn’t react. There’d been no argument, no clear reason for her declaration. “I need [...]
Spring 2015
He dumped her via a terse, two-line email. Which was surprising because for the two years they had been together he had fulfilled her requests for old-fashioned letters by writing them on unlined, creamy sheets until his hand cramped into a claw. He would email her throughout the day, obsessive bursts of news that shot [...]
Your Treasures Are Marbles Your treasures are marbles, matchbox cars, old maps, fly fishing lures you find in the reeds. Hers are shells, antler shards, acorns, the tip of a raccoon’s tail found in mulched leaves. You give her what you value most— a mayfly nymph broken off someone else’s line. She puts it with [...]
Fins Sometimes I dream you’re one of those Florida mermaids in highway towns, slipping your legs into a green iridescent tail. You kick past coral reefs built from scaffolding, pearly conch shells hiding the metal. You swim behind plate glass and sneak hits of underwater air. This is the breath you’ve been missing, Maggie, this [...]
Ode to Stretchmarks Elegy for your Breasts Amber Cloud Spring Cleaning Janlori Goldman‘s poem “At the Cubbyhole Bar” was chosen by Gerald Stern for the Raynes Prize. Janlori co-edits “The Wide Shore: A Journal of Global Women’s Poetry,” www.thewideshore.org. She teaches at Columbia University and is a writing mentor to cancer survivors [...]
Trees and moon stir into phantom shapes outside, playing naked on the empty street. Inside, a heavy mood hangs over the kitchen air. Where a platter of lemon-grass fish soup, fried pineapple rice and green bean in brown sauce, sits motionless and cold. On an oak table. It wobbles and moans. Every time she turns [...]
I’m almost seventy. When I was seventeen, the other day, I had no idea who I was and the future was so obscure. The people between funerals were a furnace of crazy burning faces rising like sparks, laughing and drunk, and flying through the chaos. Most of them burned like comets or fireworks though there [...]