Their mother is proud and calls them her famous sons on television no less. Except: Billy and Danny are videotaped stripping the renovated church, whereas Jacob absconds with the wad of cash leaving his brothers to pay for the crime.
Deathbed Wedding
After her mother’s death, Gretchen gets a call from Miguel inviting her to retrieve her mother’s possessions. When she visits, she notices new wallpaper and a Persian rug. But she sees something else—an unexpected insight into her mother’s next life.
The Foxhole in the Front Yard
Gen chased insurgents, rode Humvees across Iraq, peeled walls with the .50 caliber machine gun. Once when he got back home he grabbed his pregnant wife Karen to dig a foxhole in the front yard and she wants mangoes in the morning.
A Tale or Two
Around a tiki bar in Ecuador, visitors from Germany, Canada, Texas, and California recount their travelogues, holding forth for hours on end. And then there is the reticent Scotsman who sees a new tale beginning—in the surf’s retreating tide.
Signs
Mark Krainin disappeared ten years ago. Signs went up: Tommy Luna, Dorothy Copewell, Andrea Whitman, Justin Kint, and Edith Maynard. Ash Denton talks to them and everyone thinks he has lost his mind. And then it happens.
Fake Names
Adenocarcinoma lines his lungs; not what Richard wants to hear. He plays the tape of his father on the ledge, in the air, plunging seven floors down. Richard wonders if he himself had “always been falling and only now looked down.”
Moonlight
On a blank page a poetic story is told about the woman who finds her light in the moon amid the darkness and solitude; who opens like a flower; who is timeless and makes your heart beat faster. You want to hold her and never let her go. Who is she?
Motherhood, Ambition
Robbins didn’t know herself before she was a mother at twenty, but she was determined to know herself as an adult. This is her story about the tension between motherhood and ambition, and how she didn’t allow ambition to lose.
A Creative Interrogation of Ishion Hutchinson’s “Homage: Vallejo”
Follow Makovetsky’s exegesis of Ishion Hutchinson’s poem “Homage: Vallejo” and you are in a world of awareness in which Hutchinson uses Vallejo’s lens to talk about “being born black in a racist America”—one of Makovetsky’s many insights.
To Love the Graveyard
What is there about a graveyard to love? Families who visit? Animals that find shelter? “The silence of a thousand talking graves”? Emily Roberts explores those stories behind the stones.
Miss Julie
This is a tale about Nora’s mother Julie who has dementia and resides in Butterfly Residence. But it is also about the underside of the small town of Long River—a colony founded by women who had escaped brutal husbands.
The Games People Play
Penny, Elayna, Loulla, Sally—women Lucas juggles to make up for “the dread of humiliation that followed Olivia’s betrayal.” Even after he gets caught, he can always rely on Paris and Delphine, and maybe Debbie too.
Messy
1989
On a bright, crisp day in early October, he sped up Archie’s recently paved road and stopped inches from the twin-bay garage. He opened the driver’s door of his 1985 Chevy half-ton and swung his bad leg out first and leaned heavily on his cane.
Inside the garage, his brother stood stooped over a V-8 engine. At the sight of Moss, he dropped a piston into a valve cover and wiped his hands on a soiled cloth.
“There’s been a fire. Clara’s burned pretty bad,” Moss said, when Archie was close enough he smelled grease and dirty engine oil.
Ouijust Playin
Coaxed by his roommate to attend a séance where Simon, the special guest, leads seven participants on the Ouija board, the narrator goes through rapid-fire emotions as he and Simon connect in a paranormal drama.
Gifts
Jacqui teaches AP English at a Catholic school and her curriculum is more radical than Father Glenn likes. She loses her hat—a precious gift from Aunt Gwen—on the day Joseph brilliantly elucidates Thoreau. The hat is gone but Joseph’s eyes are brimming.
“All Things Scarlet”, “From Primrose Hill” and “Untold Miles”
Vance drapes “All Things Scarlet” in allusions—colloquial or personal—and metaphors intersect what is linear. In “From Primrose Hill,” the poet concretizes the poem in landscape imagery: “post-war tenement/brick ways, ” “many-wandered fields.” Metaphor reigns in “Untold Miles” in the first three stanzas but focuses on the “not-quite-lovers in the last.
“The New Adventures Of”, “Opa” and “When”
Like a page from a memoir in “The New Adventures of,” the poet rejects her father’s rants and repulses an arranged marriage. A similar feat is fulfilled line by poetic line in “Opa,” the poet having found a fire-opal, “no opal omen of/ruin.” And in “When,” the poet pleas for racial justice and names the names, “Book of remembrance, book of tears.”
Songs for Trying: “Losing Interest,” “Winter Blues” and “The Impermanence of Sinking”
The metaphors of water and sun run through Beamer’s poetry, as if pool water and the smell of chlorine can “block the rest of the world,” and the sun’s sinking in the sea at night isn’t the same as drowning. So too “sunlight becomes a hard, palpable thing,” a corrective to her “winter blues.”
“You Ungrateful Girl”, “Wrong Side Out” and “Best Left Buried”
Read the titles first and enter Stone’s undiluted poetry with eyes wide open. Significance lies in the poet’s voice and imbalance of power in “You Ungrateful Girl”; in the descriptive tone and revealed irony in “Wrong Side Out”; and in the dare to unbury a rotting corpse like a metaphor of “rages” and “barbed words.”
“The Dead Wall of Silence”, “Pieces” and “Scratching Out Earth”
In “The Dead Wall of Silence” the poet alludes to a partition against the backdrop of “sheep/and suckled cattle” in atypical dimeter and trimeter feet. In “Pieces,” he is not done with the fracturing: “Actual actions of schisms,” “splintered spectators,” “absolute absence”—just pieces. And in “Scratching Out Earth,” the poet faithfully renders the title in imagistic verse.
“Don’t Hang Your Soul on That”, “Slant” and “Sugar Sandwiches”
When you read a Hilles poem, you are inside a lyricism that doesn’t stop at the length of the poem but continues to move as if the poet has shown you how to be with love and life and soul, even if you have to eat sugar sandwiches. Read these poems and you will see.
“An Old Song”, “The Incident” and “Acceptable”
Reger’s poetry wraps you in narratives of love and pain, sadness and longing. There is no escape from the sadness in the ballad “An Old Song.” Neither is there from the death of two lovers whispering lullabies on the banks of the Tigris in “The Incident.” Nor from the longing in the lyrical poem “Acceptable.”
“Purpose (Predestined Love)”, “Love” and “Frozen Dream”
Huang knows her way around personification—the transference of human feelings and attributes to abstract concepts—and she crafts the poems “Purpose” and “Love” using this figurative device. The poet switches to a witty-metered play on words in the onomatopoetic poem “Frozen Dream” —gifted with alliteration and assonance.
“To Pain”, “Bosom Story” and “I Hear You’ve Settled In”
In the prose poem “To Pain,” the poet addresses her pain directly and forces it to the surface, giving it an immediate presence. Employing the same rhetorical device—the apostrophe— in “I hear you’ve settled in,” the poet addresses her absent lover, inviting the reader to listen too. “Bosom Story” is a narrative and as reachable.