The shadows thrown by snowcaps here are thin as hose or onionskin, and what the clouds cast massive over town is not so proud that it won’t scatter once the South howls in. At two the street-lit lawn still squints our shades; by dawn the focal watts of sunshot want […]
How deep? Some six thousand meters, in meters. In light years it’s further than Vega. Deep as any man’s pride and then some— you can hear the Earth move her bowels. Men sink in a blue submersible: eight sets of restraints and an airlock that drops off new inmates like roe. There’s always an odd […]
It’s been a pretty athletic performance, if I do say so myself, and as we finish I’m winded, just holding Jennifer close, and about to start kissing the salt off her neck when the birds pipe up at the window. All night we left it open to the breeze— more than warm already now […]
Hallelujah, it’s nobody’s birthday! Nobody’s wedding and nobody’s wake! For once the glib calendar’s dumb. These brave hours have sloughed off their date. No unions are striking, no voters are polled, though if anything dawn has come early. While the coffee is yet to be ground, our displeasures dissolve prematurely. We’re a people […]
What I wanted to say to my brother the dial tone was already tenderly humming, so I lay the phone down without placing a number. I might have lullabied it to my bride instead, but she was listening to her pillow so intently that she’d closed her patient eyes. The blackened television beat […]
No more books or music for tonight, and nothing new on cable, nothing to clean or cook or suffer through. Just sighs between the minutes as this white typhoon of moonlight tries to shake the room and all that’s right within it. The clock face wears a sheen of […]
He is holding this grenade he’s found in the clammy fog of five am and he’s pulled the pin somehow on accident. To let it go will spring the lever. That, or he’s clasping an ornate doorknob, warm from fire in the room beyond, and he can’t decide if he should enter. Doing so might […]
Rosalie Moffett reads and talks about her favorite poem, Marie Howe’s “The Gate.”