night has arrived / look, the sky is dark, dark we line up and follow the path of horsetails / tap, tap the fiddleheads unfurl their tender faces mountain’s breath, fairy bells / the forest is…

What a day! What a day I wasn’t expecting! It began same old same old, coffee—NOT TEA!—coffee! Then the phone rings and it's too early for the phone to ring, but I pick up, and who is it but my…

Vito Spatfore's lost weight. No more manicotti, steamy saucy red and heavy on his plate. No more melting mozzarell, oozing creamy white. No more meat. No meat, only baby carrots, slimy and bland as…

after summer rain, pulpy tears on wet cement. Luca used to write love notes on birch scraps for witchy paramours. Now, they’re a doctor with a wife and kids in Ann Arbor, a large wooden desk stacked…

distill becoming into the freedom to choose and serve at room temp use the good glasses hold crystal to the sun and let it light the way i’d recommend you at a dinner party or talking to the moon i’

That summer, when pregnant was a club they kept kicking me out of I was a gumball machine of bad babies. Wrong babies, backward babies, backdoor babies, cranking the dial in a flurry of silver coins…

when I am dead, I hope to be hopeful and when I am reincarnated, I hope to be well-rested I hope to be well when I am reincarnated rested, hopeful, and dead I hope well when I am and when I hope to…

For real: an impossible silk dress, aged and unlarvaed. And for the lady, a zinc compact, which will open wide into knowing. For actual love, one must keep the lips parted, formally welcome curls of…

after The Queen of Country, Dolly Parton Drag Queens across the valley hold their wigs across their hearts and a dive regular plays Taps with her acrylics on the bar. Doves and does alike put their…

soft skull of a man told me I have soft teeth. My teeth, like the fuzzy piece of peach, soft. Have you heard this? That even teeth can be soft? Molars worn from carrying myth, slicing soft yoke. I…

The poets I know don't draft in here, but I do. Open the window and enter the room. Let chance play. Don't be a bitch about it, said Richard Serra, or something to that effect. He died last week. He…

The windmill had originally been five miles away in the 1790s. Mom was turning sixty-six in a few days and she’d been talking about wanting a kind of oyster the whole trip but the name kept slipping…

Hey chat, it’s ya boy Maddox back today with another talisman review and, man, oh man, do we have a doozy this time: an Amulet of Omniscience—that’s right; I snagged this puppy on pre-sale—and look,…

Aviary Afternoon lifts from the brick. Birds cool in the oven, song rolling their tender glass eyes. One pulls a lightbulb from under its wing. We clap. There’s sadness to it, this elegy lit

Fig trees. Choice begets loss. Blah, blah, blah, blah. Anyhow, my body’s drying up. Quite nearly geriatric, as they say. I hold children like watermelon—strained, seasonal. Children roam the…

This May be the longest moving stairway in the whole damn w orld. Unrolled, I bet i t would stretch from the White House to Reagan Airport and back again. I onc e timed it out of boredom, a nd it…

Reggie got so high, she couldn’t remember where she’d put her keys. She’d left the meeting with the studio execs, one of them offering her blow in the men’s restroom but where were her keys? She’d…

The black sign nailed to the telephone pole instructs: FOLLOW THE HAPPYS. At the corner store I buy a fizzy cold soda so I can swallow the happys. The summer we slink home to my tiny room near the…

The cow costume upstairs, the floppy felt ears, the little felt horns, the laughing, the grocery store, the narrow aisle with the milk behind all that glass, the cheese, the yogurt, the meat aisle…

Kelly Erin had accumulated so many Dunkin' Donuts points that it drew the attention of the CFO. "She cashes even a quarter of this in and we're bankrupt." "How is that possible?" the CEO demanded to…

stomping over the red clay rustling fire ants just below through the undergrowth we’d ford the crick with help of a felled tree tying strings to sticks and baiting them with syrupy gum zooey and i…

Everybody seems enraptured by liminal spaces now. One of my favorites used to be the airport, until I died there. It seems too on-the-nose to face life and death somewhere people arrive and depart in…

by Casey Flynn In two weeks I will find a stuffed unicorn under my daughter’s bed and when I pick it up it will tell me that in two years I’ll meet a woman at a writing conference who will say that t...

Never alone always a meeting the feeling, lime quarry same damn trees. Don’t have to ask They’ll just tell you. Stories hounded into place Homer on sublocade. The names carved into the bricks have…

Ten past midnight on a Saturday night in September I sat in the upper rooms of a club in Glasgow. I'd been there about an hour when someone came up behind me and said: "You'll not believe me, but the…

I met JoJo Siwa and she crafted a new dance just for me we were both at a pet adoption event in a strip mall next to her studio it felt like receiving a papal blessing like wrapped in a wind of neon…

We’re in the corn maze at a pumpkin farm. It’s cold. The kids are running and I’m following, not exactly trotting but taking big steps. They’re laughing and saying shit to each other I can’t hear. The…

Five sisters went walking on a morning in May. The youngest, the dumbest, though smart in her way, Picked up a branch, Spanish moss hung at the end, And flung the moss on her dear sisters’ heads. And…

La Jolla The people of La Jolla are riotous gardeners. Their bougainvilleas are obscene. We want to walk to the beach but the sidewalk moves under our feet. The hill rises up and tries to shake us ...

In the valley of Saint Peter I go to the river and find it dry. Yes, it’s life to die for these contradictions. Water cold enough will feel like burning. It takes a moment to register heat. # Andy…