Page 2 - Issue 159 News Today

Google tells me they are hyper-seasonal, highly coveted. my yard tells me they are hyper-attainable, highly abundant. on awinding drive up a rocky road to the mountains, my lover tells me ramps are ramps. got it. i grew upjust four hours north of here, so why do ramps feel so foreign? i rip them from my driveway, root and stem, and tossthem aside. a proper burial is

It is St. Patrick’s Day, 1989, and I am fifteen years old. On that Friday evening, Demetris, a friend from school, is at a party. I am known as a social butterfly because I am outgoing and funny, and make people feel comfortable without being terrible. Demetris, a year older, also possesses these traits, and perhaps this is the crux of our friendship. Though I am not at the party; rather, I am at home watching TV— Moonlighting or Murder, She Wrote or The Golden Girls—cradled inside the ...

The immortal dogs of my fictions,exhausted from centuries of fetch,are laid out in puddles of sunor rummaging for slugsin the banks of soggy leaves.It is autumn, and the airis a bakery of dander and pollen.It is autumn, and the immortaldogs of my fictions are sniffingand digging for ancient wisdoms.In the bulges of mulch, in theoutstretched hands of children,there is something

Tottenham HaleIf I were to startagain, I’d startat the end of the long,unbending street.The Turkish restaurantby Christ’s Pieces.King’s Cross.Or the bus as it leechesmy heart, so sick a thingit almost longs for woe.You see—less changedthan I ought to be.If you knew, you’d laughwith the rest of us.What, O God, ensuresmy song?Grace, my love. Yearssince I’ve touched it.

—a painting by the British artist J. M. W. Turner.

Arthur Solway’s poetry and essays have appeared in The Antioch Review, Barrow Street, BOMB, The London Magazine, Salmagundi, Southern Poetry Review, TriQuarterly and elsewhere. He was cited among the 2018 finalists for the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize, finalist for the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Award in 2019, and the 2020 finalist for Anhinga Press-Robert Dana Prize for Poetry. A graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, his critical reviews, profiles, and cultural essay...

Over their twice-monthly pint of Guinness, two friends discover that their babies-to-be, the first for each man, are due only a week apart and that both will be daughters. The fair-haired friend’s happy exultation touches off a series of congratulations from the other patrons; the bartender, who has little girls of his own, serves them several more rounds on the house.

My love mentions that people see stars bestfrom the corners of their eyes, that conescatch color in the centers, but it’s the rodson the outsides that fetch the dimmest portionsof the visible spectrum—and I am forcedto reconcile with the fact that something so roundas vision still pushes people into corners

Outdoors in my sun-blasted xeriscape, a saplingshivers with memories of green rain, greenery of jade dishes, of scallion chins afloat in a bowl of seaweed miso-broth, of uranium milk glass flashing in black light, of fruiting olives finning silver, fanned sage-leaf over bleached feathergrass where bees enflesh their bold, brassy honeycombs –in this margin of humid compost

I hear chains as they approach. There are other rez boys around, so I know I will pay for staring, but I stare. Boys like us are bloodied here. Boys like Micah and me. Micah walks up with the others. He acts like the others. But boys like him and me, we stand too close. We glance at dirty ankles and want to fold our hands around each one. We watch sweat drip down the backs of bodies like our own and want to catch it with our tongues. We watch for a glimpse of the fine hairs that lead beneath ba...