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Issue 11.1 Fall 1981 Simon Perchik   How far will our shadows stay empty before the strongest stars give up —this paving too, a weightless mask. Pull. We will load the Earth, fill this street with more dark, give our gangling shadows a burden, tame them to carry away our deepest selves, and at night…

Gauley River

Melissa Tuckey   It was the lightest sort of rain one could drown in it without knowing In the mountains an ark skeleton of whale Late night you can hear him on the radio saying follow me or drown I listen when I am out of coffee I remember you filed your nails with a…

When the Giraffes Come

Melissa Tuckey   The last days of July we walk past an oak struck by lightning bark blown hundreds of feet above the creek and hanging rocks and Pete asks will you put all of this in a poem? And will I include the part about giraffes taking over the continent? And the elephants fucking…

The Empty House

Melissa Tuckey   Because the weight of grandmother’s death Three tables inherited from various aunts Because twelve deer grazing in a winter field Clothing worn once then tossed Because shelter, because sleep Child on the floor with a bowl of plums We loved the lack of closets The way paint on the walls could fill…

Gravedigger

Ed Lynskey   Call me a gravedigger. By night I shovel the moist moments away till the empty depth can hold my heart, my injured heart. Still she lies like a smirking shadow in the bottom of the black hole making me dig deeper and deeper, the grave of the lovesick fool.   Ed Lynskey…

Generosity of Attire

Issue 38.1 Spring 2009 Rusty Morrison   You might have referred to what reconciles us, our complicitly complicated wounds. While all around us, the cloudlessness has blue as its answer. And you give it. I have no gift ready as reply. Sky, I could say, in abeyance. In abiding, but a failure might at least…

Generosity: to Quarry Stones

Issue 38.1 Spring 2009 Rusty Morrison   I am drawing your face from memory. Leaving spaces for the stones I’ve not classified, will not find. Granite striates the outcroppings at Half Dome, this is a decade past. Pillow basalt along the Coast Range of Jenner; where either of us might have been the one falling,…

December Nights

Susan C. Waters   A cry holds the night open— I lean forward to the window: wind rubs raw through the pines and the land is full of drifts. It’s certain no one walks there, or cries, except ghosts. The further north travelled the more difficult the measure of a night—it could be a lifetime…

For Ross Elliott, Who Lived to 97

Susan C. Waters   Fog rises tonight. All breath levitates: from every hill, valley and all the rivers, winding and plowing through the dark night. In Ohio even the breath of an old man lifts from his shell, with as much ease as it did when he was a Coshocton country boy at the turn…

Homage

Eric Pankey   O my God, looming and rough-hewn, Forge me with rage. If this is the purge Ferret out and scald the cold grub Burrowed in at my heart. Let havoc Consume its nest and larder. Let your gold cauter staunch the wound. Fall inviolate sledge, and be known. Blast away the sawdust and…