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From WHAT HANGS ON THE SIDE OF THE MOUTH

Rosebud Ben-Oni

Amaranthine & thinning the mist
Amaranthine skinned she & I drift
Through the bird market
Through yuen po street
Your mother is squeezing my hand
We should go home & sleep
How long has it been
Pricks
Eye & fist
I know all the birds by name
I am reciting somewhere else
Amaranthine
After a gulf coast hurricane
I'd mend leg fracture & wing
Shelter in enclosures open &
Wild I learn the winged
Amaranthine 
Awakening
Hard & thin
I run after
Never again
Will I see so many
Wild amazons the truest I'll ever know
Squalling over the rio grande
Here I no longer belong to them
In a market I cannot click & sing
To peach-faced lovebirds
& overcrowded cages of parakeets
I don't know what keeps

Irreversible

Paige Lewis

One minute she was dancing—a faint
                layer of sweat, a tight blue dress—and then.
Her boyfriend said her death sounded
                like humming, said he'd never put his hands
on love again. When God's not looking, X
                and I scrape around for videos of this
woman's spontaneous combustion. We
                don't really have to be quick about it—
God's blinks last a long while: X could twine
                the beaks of twenty starlings and still have
time for a nap. I could wear a belt of figs
                and mantis wings while begging X to
blow on my pink belly, and still—Hell, I
                could sweep dirt under God's eyelid and
bear witness to the nothing that comes of it. 

If It Pleases

Christopher J. Adamson

I           first am an impostor,
Then an improper        vacationer among the ruins of error, 

Then am porous in the mouth—                      violent, redundant.
Land of heartless brothers. Land of the unwed. 

Of the callous and the harsh climate, or so they have said. Of the why and un-why-ed.
I have kept my promise to the sky, she lied. I have lied for you, she lied. 

And in the eye of the undusted daughter, anointed and unbothered, was I.
Flawed from all of this I have fled. It was awfully unlawful to flee, 

But me, I cannot keep to laws. I could not see to see.
Unwilling witness,                   bodies outsourced to the sea.

 

Made Line

Nicholas Gulig

Superior, by which I mean the lake was not 
As much as we imagined 
It, a synonym, or else the surface 
Cold because the light 
Was catastrophic
In the distance, no, the water made of its 
Appearances, the presence of 
A promise formed 
The shore, the waves repeating 
And repeatable. I had thought 
That I was thinking 
Up, was therefore under it, the sky  

Was strange within 
The world at once upon 
But not itself 
Belonging. We looked away, 
Were other than 
And then the day was not of what between us 
Edged, growing 
Into sand the dark dissolved
To something less
Than brilliance, the wind within 
Itself a distance 
Yet again, a distance. I had to ask it  

During the Middle Ages

Camille Guthrie

O God I am so fat
I cry all the time
A kitten scrubbed with a toothbrush online makes me sob
I’m so heartless seven species of bees
Are now endangered and I didn’t do a thing
Didn’t even send any money
To anybody doing any good
And I can’t lose any weight I skipped yoga
I’m so hot all the time so broke
So pathetic no wise investments
Should’ve bought a 7-Eleven on a busy corner
When I was seven or eleven
Nobody wants to lick my neck
Nobody wants to hold my hand at the doctor’s office
Nobody to grow old with me I’m so crabby
To pluck my beard feed the cat I don’t have
And read me endless Russian novels at night
All the ones I still haven’t got to so greatly depressing
Where are you handsome? Are you
Driving in your car to come visit me

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