The Spring Issue | 2025
Herewith, our (late) Spring Issue, breaking the cold in anticipation of lazy months to come. Check back daily for new poems, stories and more.
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Herewith, our (late) Spring Issue, breaking the cold in anticipation of lazy months to come. Check back daily for new poems, stories and more.
Herewith, our (late) Spring Issue, breaking the cold in anticipation of lazy months to come. Check back daily for new poems, stories and more.
No one knows how much the silverware drawer matters. It rattles in Leah’s mind if it’s left unorganized. She checks it often.
B O D Y reviews new pamphlets by David Kinloch, James Appleby, and Sophie Cooke.
When I told my mother she has dementia, / she said that of course she’d get dementia / because her mom had Alzheimer’s but // she doesn’t have that yet because she remembers
there is no time for tears, there never is; / no time for breathing deep. / A fit of sadness is like pulling a door that says push, / again and again, into eternity
An old man has been blocking my view. / Get out! I shout. He shouts it back. // I open my mouth. He inspects my teeth, / ducks out of view.
He didn’t recognize me, or else pretended not to see me. A neighbour who doesn’t say hello. I’m a neighbour who is see-through, perhaps completely invisible, not aware of being perfectly camouflaged.
The big one was launched at dawn. Doesn’t matter / who sent it. Soon there will be others, / enough missiles to blanket the sky. I’m with you now, / under a willow, next to a pond, a crow is perched / on a rock hunting worms.
I know this silence / by heart, willed stillness, rotten // moon pulling itself through / the cavity of window.
There was nothing I could have done / about the life I was born into. / It was waiting for me, and I slipped into it / like a man waking up in a dream.
My sister bought me a “Sucka Free” hoodie in the ‘80s when Yo! MTV Raps was hot. I wore that shirt till the hole under the right arm couldn’t be mended anymore. That was 1999, ten years after Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince won the inaugural Best Rap Performance Grammy. At that time, I really believed I was sucka free …
Geoffrey pulls his hand from his pocket and withdraws the four-inch handle of a switchblade knife. Jason’s face turns ghostly. The American yells and runs out the door, causing his friend to follow. Most of the others never saw what Geoffrey showed the White man, although they laugh at the commotion it causes and applaud the result.
Even the curve of a conch shell / goes forever inward to an ending / too small for us to see. I put my ear / to it and hear Do not disturb my circles
My mother / paid for groceries one dollar bill / at a time. When I left home // she lost a third of her aid.
Horror stares back at me surreptitiously from every corner of the flat with wide-open cats’ eyes. The reflexes I had of old have become alien to me. They tempt me to provoke her, but thankfully I’m still paralysed and the only way I can wind her up is by staring at her neck.
If our parents were here, they would already have sent us to bed. / And once again, I wouldn’t notice that it’s my younger brother / with whom I’m having the longest relationship of my life.
The big story is the old dog dying slowly, / half her mouth working tender bits / she is hand fed, strokes or tumor / or both, unsettling her stomach. / The big story, her good days, little one / her bad.
I dreamt kindness to animals was widespread, / Their demand on our powers greater and still greater. // If a rope broke, we released the herd. / If a drop of rain fell, we unveiled a flock of birds.
I know my neighbours by their walk. / Our walls are thin. A sort of string / between two cans, our stack of floors. / I hold it to my ear. It sings.
You can’t say he failed to choose a path in life, failed to make the sacrifice of choosing because there was nothing for him to choose at that time.
I took my nails into my thighs and smiled. I looked at your hands on the steering / wheel, drumming. I willed them to swerve us all into a tragedy tasting of concrete. / I suddenly saw myself in another ten years, still sitting there, humming.
no one cared, not then, not now, still what got lost & when, on the snowy side of a street, cold buildings cold book in hand inscribed in colored pencil no myth but those imagined & those at best misunderstood
A dog bites down on a stick of dynamite and takes off running. They are going to explode together. Imagine: making someone feel like that, making them lose their mind like that.
Such an itch you are / man I don’t quite know // all the things you might say / if we were on your terrace / with a beer
From a very young age my star stopped shining. / And among the many battles between life and death, / I discovered, I think by chance, the meaning of life.
He wishes he could experience the transition to evening / less like a hungry moth flapping its dust towards the magnetic / pools of light, more like a rare edition in the hands of tiny / librarians
Is this the murderer, or the wee nyaff / that kicks the hippocampus when I’m tired? / And should I yell or let it wander off, / my crisis just a detail on the ward / that nobody will log, unless I call?
Dear Bill: I’m sorry to hear you’re dead. / You hated the fig-leaf euphemisms / Of pulpit-jockeys who peddle heavens, / So you’d like me calling this spade a spade: // I died a bit myself, when I heard.
When the man in the row behind me / starts shouting that he wants off this plane, / I start thinking / how I’m not really in the mood to die today.
a lot of parenting is getting the first child to play / with the second child / so you don’t have to do it
Because we like flowers close to us we hold them / a little longer than their natural cycles. / See these four-hundred-year-old honeysuckles /
in Herrick’s poems. How his rhymes enfold them.
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