Tag: Issue 5

  • Packing: Writing on the Move

    It’s evening and I’m packing for an early morning flight to New York City. Tomorrow I’ll join a large reading focusing on love and hope (something I need more than ever these days), then I’ll host a reading celebrating the work of the writer Rigoberto Gonzalez. I’m used to travel. I can even say I…

  • Ada Limón

    Ada Limón is the author of five books of poetry, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry and was named one of the top five poetry books of the year by the Washington Post. Her fourth book Bright Dead Things was named a finalist for the National Book Award,…

  • Ada Limón

    Ada Limón is the author of five books of poetry, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry and was named one of the top five poetry books of the year by the Washington Post. Her fourth book Bright Dead Things was named a finalist for the National Book Award,…

  • Elli McGuire

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  • THE NEXT TABLE

    Two cafe tables sit side by side onstage. TOBY is already seated at one table, his back to the other table. ERICA sits in the seat directly behind him so they are back to back. When she pulls out her chair, he turns around, they make brief eye contact and share a smile, and then…

  • LEMONS

    I look at reflections through a plate; this is what it’s come down to for not having stepped out since their gardens aren’t for chaste lemons; plants on this turf have not seen weightless days under the sun. The sky hangs them like unfallen rain waiting to be picked, nights scrape their faces for zest…

  • CAESURA

    Most every night as a teenager: my face lit by television, dull and pastel glaze  molting from the small screen. Common comedy. Late-night talk shows with scripted jubilance.  Hard not to see these evenings  as wasted, spent knelt at a vapid altar.  When the shows melted into infomercials,  I’d roll my unfinished body in the…

  • ENJOY THE CLAMS

    When Claire traveled, which she did often, she left a message in the bathroom of every hotel room she slept in, for the eyes of whoever stayed there after she had gone. She would write it on the mirror, in big letters, with a bar of soap, smearing the soap thickly onto the mirror, then…

  • THE DIAGNOSIS

    From the winter’s blue dark, the crows floated in through the open window where my mother and I slept in our shared bed. They came and burrowed under the quilts, one on my chest, embracing my heart. My mother laid motionless. She did not cry and in the blackness I strained to speak but my…