photo by Kieth Dodson

by Patricia Aya Williams

December 1970

Dad at a desk turning to face
the camera, left hand on the keys
of a typewriter, right hand resting
on an open drawer, white pencil
lifted lightly, ready to erase
the mistake he’s just made—
one that I can’t see—on the paper
poised in the platen, the clatter
of type his quick fingers command
momentarily stalled.
The carrier’s walls—color of dirty
dishwater, hospital grunge,

by Jan Clausen

Arrow and bow
You get my drift
No bucket list
I’ll just kick it

Purple pansies next to Frick
Bloom in geometric beds
Perky periodontist
Scrapes expensively my teeth
Rather than hamper defeat
People peer at screens, mirrors
Snooze as losses mount, bleed out

A rat’s ass, he thinks, chicks don’t give
Regarding the pleasure of men
Dogwoods appear to console us
For magnolias’ departure
Art is not a matter of will
I’m a cunning emergency
Take the Q train,

art by Helen Hofling

by Samuel Piccone

Someone I love tells me the world is a house
            I’m always running into by running from,
                        that flowers begin staling the moment

they flower, so enough already with the flowers.
            A flower is a body, and a body is also a container
                        for every atom it will never hold—

imagine filling a room with so many remainders.
            Dear God, enough already. With running. With oblivion
                        and flowers. Someone I love tells me

no one will if I don’t start closing my mouth
           

art by Richard Hanus

by Carolyn Oliver

Forsaking every landscape
but this placid plain, their bodies wed

skill to physics. Her skull floats
down, risks the ice as if

she means to kiss his blades.
What kind of love imagines

he could let go of her wrist
he could let go of her
he could let go
he could
he—

This is the easiest death spiral.

That year of brief landscapes
my friends’ pity towed me

to a little house plunked down
by the bay.

art by JJ Cromer

by Stephen Smith

 For Emily

Now it seems further than the past itself,
even outside of time: Barthes and his dictionary,
though we debated if it was his own encyclopedia,
knowing we knew not the answer, the white board
always covered with what seemed the algebra of a life.
We considered it quantum, at best. I failed to get past
Marlon Riggs and his essential question, my legs
each evening folded in a chair on some cold library floor,