Valentine’s Day

by Sarah Maclay

White chicken

Attached to a tree
At neck and legs
With string

Sarah Maclay is the author of three poetry collections-Music for the Black Room, Whore, and The White Bride (all from …

You Offer Lychee to Your American Friends

by Diane Lockward

 

–for Belle Yang

 

In the gilded bowl your mother sent from China,
you arrange two pounds of lychee–
strawberry-red, rose-colored, amber-yellow,
all aromatic and heart-shaped,
a bowlful of edible jewels.

You place …

The Varieties of Love

by Robert Thomas

1

Jan and her boyfriend rented movies,
stayed up all night, and made love after each film.
This, to Jan, was sublime: sex with the afterimage
of a blue car driving …

In My Little Paradise

by Ira Sadoff

So overgrown, the yellow poppies

keel over. After so much beauty,

after the heat spells of August,
a full house and then an empty house,

sweeping up to a little music
(a favorite …

A city in heaven

by Patricia Spears Jones

Soprano’s words pearls the soft sheen summer evening

Off under the undertow depth charges blonde the currents
Everybody everybody dance   at least flap wings and sky
Outer limits slum dwellers calculate …

This and That

by Anna Leahy

is the demonstrative but

don’t-pin-me-down response.
It is the fear of voicing the idea too soon,
or revealing the secret no one wants.
It coyly averts fireworks:
either that palm-tree spread …

Deciphering the Signs

by Lorene Delany-Ullman

Because there was no catcher for summer ball his sophomore year in high school, Denis volunteered to catch, to be the backstop. Green though he was, he was a good …

Storytelling

by Amy Newlove Schroeder

Paper people in a paper land,

a paper house, crazily slanted,
a house like a child would draw:

 

a square, a triangle, a circle
for the sun.

 

Stick people stand outside the house

Caligula

by Amy Lawless

They smashed her head against the wall.

They took the head I held in my hand.

Smaller than a sandwich.

Perfect pink beast.

They took that same head.

They smashed my baby’s head against the …

The Present

by D. Nurkse

We made models: this is a moment of happiness,

this is a maple-shaded street, its yellow median line
littered with double wings: some day we might know such things
in our …

A Real Scream

by Charles Harper Webb

–for Stephen King

 

Carrie doesn’t die in the house-fire her mind sets
after flying steak-knives crucify her mom. Healing
the stab-wound in her back, she hot-foots to the one

comedy club in …

Requiem

by Christopher Davis

Here at this condemned Pick-n-Save,

its picture windows cracked, streaked

with bird shit or white paint, flesh-
beige tape, dried by the sun, peeling

back, my dying mother bought stacks
of cheap dishes …