The Desert

Soon. Soon.

Whenever won't be long.

***

Things are sad.

Sad like thrift store crowds

and the desert beyond

the Walmart lights.

Sad like fat hunger and

the smell of break rooms.

There's grass here, he says.

I haven't seen grass in a long time.

Her lips, like boiling clams, open.

***

Blood red veins of the cork

like the trails of ants.

Summer: we eat fat pears

and drink straight from the bottle.

By Jackelyn Hoy

Overbites and Understandings

my friends go as far as nick-names go.

counting backwards one year from one thousand.

you've made a mess,

i've made ammends.

fourteen facial fractures in seething

yellows and resounding blues.

By Darren Hall

The Slow Walk Home

An evening out,

A day at work,

Or is it the other way around?

Run wild on the front yard, Rover,

But beware of the electric fence.

Houses as far as the eye can see,

Each filled with people,

Fulfilling their duties.

Part of my brain sees the potential,

But another part prevails,

And reminds me,

Of the

Slow

Walk

Home.

By Kevin O'Sullivan

Bork Slow

Standing northwest,

a helmet shiny with new paint.

Resolute, facing away

from the traffic on

the corner of a busy street.

Resilient in the morning sun.

Brown coat, military perhaps,

anticipating response

that may never (could never) come.

Above his head, held

like a standard bearer,

unwilling to let the message

be misread.

"Bork Slow".

By Brad M. Bucklin

Knit

There it was: cast on, cast

off the botched rows.

The unstitch and pulled

needles soothe an extension

of the body and how

you hate taking up space.

It seemed the transformation

were to no end, as though

the scarf weren’t a scarf,

but a blanket you couldn’t stop knitting

until even the pattern began to change.

By Karen Alayna Thimell

Monday Night

His sleeves

rolled up

giving his

young son

a bath;

the new

widower.

By C.A. Leibow

Bottle(s)

Drunk on assembling the scattered shards

green beer and blue wine

and transparent water my fingers

work to have something to fill.

By John Sibley Williams