October 26, 2021
October 12, 2021
Poetry
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[Download the e-book Blaze A Vanishing by Alan Morrison] Alan Morrison's e-book Blaze A Vanishing is available here in its entirety as a WLT web exclusive to go along with... -
Sandy stands in the designer-wear sectionof a suburban department storein her best jeans and a cheery holidaysweater picked up at the Goodwill.The Muzak versions of Christmas carolsleave a hollow ache...
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I try to tell my brother not to call himself a “go-fer”just because he fetches cardboard for women shouting, “Bring me a double order,” who get paid by the piece. A thin vibration against her machin...
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“You’re a big guy. You should be working construction.” – a woman in line at Kmart Every time I swung a sledgehammer,shattered the faces o...
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maybe we should just writeand see what happens and what if something does?could we live with ourselvesif nothing did? nothing has in such a long timeand yet that’s a lie too didn’t you just laugh, s...
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Blind dog staccato howlsin regular intervals in four-four time,on guard like me, can’t sleep.Am I happier here?When in we talked like cellmates,“How many years you got?” Wife alongside, “Wish that dam...
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Love picks its way through the gravel rutsleading into the job site, past the truck tiresexploded nearby, the crows’ rusted voices, blackwings and feet, cottonwoods risen in ghostlyfields and the leve...
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When I was young and had to rise at 5 a.m.I did not look at the lamplight slicingthrough the blinds and say: Once againI have survived the night. I did not raisemy two hands to my face and whisper:Thi...
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Boy, don’t you kick that ball in tha garden. If you kick thatball in tha garden one mo time, imma tan yo’ little brown hiney! Anna “Mut...
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The vendor closing up on Wolfe and Monumentdeconstructs the skewered souvlaki. A striped umbrella on a truck.Someone buys a soda. Someone rents the scent of onions wafting up.How is it upheld? This fo...
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for the sharecropper I left behind in ’79 Thirteen years ago, before bulk barns andfifth gear diesel tractors, we rode ro...
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Five years old, I am chubby, strong, husky, and brown. My hair bleached under southern sun smelling of saltwater, Spanish moss, and cedar, parted down middle pulled into pigtails, that droop in aftern...
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My dinged-up Honda sputtersto the next school, next class –Freshman Comp 101, where students in sweatsyawn away my 8 a.m. lecture and the new recruit quarterbackslouches at his seat, texts while his g...
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If you have a map, eat it.The old man wedging curb-dirt under his nailswill give you directions for getting lost.Getting off the grid involves talking in tongueswith other tongues. Follow the sidewalk...
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Behind our homes a road liesit suffers like a patch of skin alteredby its rash, a scarred spine, yearsof combined ruts. Aging fence linesborder the fields’ windswept grass. Retired from factory work,...
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In the year of our Constitution, 1787, our country was already over 150 years into the practice of creating FREE & CHEAP laborers for life. And in 1786, printers in our then capital of Philade...
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Photo by Mike Baird/Flickr Scribbles on the Poverty Line When I was a girl in a poor familywe hung our clothes to dry on the povertyline,and with it I jumped rope.My friends saw and joined me.We were... -
White Body Radiation Every day adjustments before give upbefore make do start where a clothespin clips a nose and breath is held until – What is a thing of beautyif it isn’t us? And if a body i...
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Photo by Takeshi+81/Flickr § Leaves and twigs on the ground Do I have to know the name of that tall tree to free-fall from her canopy? In my language there are 1,500 synonyms for penis, and...
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Photo by Bill Barber/Flickr Essay on Caution Unmatched is freedom from ties,he says, giving me a dark blue plum. I have frayed shoelaces and there is shameattached to these shoelaces, great shame. I...
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Norge Espinosa Mendoza. Photo by Carolina Vilches In the wee hours of the sinister National Night,when winter is nothing, and nostalgia can barely endure,I return to you, I shield myself in you, I se...
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Photo: Daniel Boud This is my devotion, then: to walk sometimes with the dog through the sclerophyll Cathedral of the morning. To let myself Off my lead...
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Translator’s note: Roubaud wrote the first poem, “À cinq heures du soir” (itself a nod to Lorca’s famous “La cogida y la muerte”), about Warren Motte’s dog Lucy, who shared with her owner a g...
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Ghazal Shakeel Badayuni My heart longs to go beyond the obsession of love,and find joy in a new session of love. Love drowned me in its tidesbut my heart hopes that was a mere dig...
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Placing Everything on the Line Zvonko Karanović A car stops in the middle of the screena gentleman walks out dressed in black, wearing a hat, grabs a frightened girl by the armblackmails her to...
