Page 2 - Issue 161 News Today

He measured things—all things. I pictured that he took a tape out and drew notch to notch from end to end, even though it didn’t work that way. The drawings on paper he laid on the table before us were ideas. The database was building, online.“What is it for? I asked him. I had seen him, lean and handsome, at a table alone in the bar and I joined him. He was an architect by

He had asked her to have drinks in the wax-figure-themed bar attached to the movie theater, though they’re not seeing a movie and though, she will discover, he does not drink. He lives in the same building, on the thirteenth floor, he told her in their early messages, and still manages to be twenty-five minutes late. She orders a bourbon, neat. It had been her father’s drink,

It sounds, at first, like a bird. The way birds sound. Caws and chirps and trills. Occasionally, the tree will shimmy in the place it has made its home. The leaves will rustle to indicate there is an animal inside the tree.

We did not make our sea’s idea of order. Yet we are the makers of our ever-hooded. Let me not let be unseemly finales— bulbous racism. That white lamp. Bronze syntactical solenoids latch: Stevens’s affixing despite the beam. Bronzeville’s reddest room ablated by a whitest house fixture. Let me not let be his unseemly remark when Brooks won the Pulitzer. Let me not let be I

The last day of April, showers and all. A clammy rain that’s less than refreshing. Water wrung from a mildewed sponge.The fog slips the city into a dress made of gauze. Wildlife plops itself onto lawns.Bunnies, bunnies everywhere! Like big plump hopping loaves of bread.Like children we crave people to examine our wounds. Like Christ we show our wounds reluctantly to

I had been ridden all night and woke up wet and intemperateand walked out because of the economy and back without a single pieceof fruit or one end of a halter around a chestnut mare. Spit and hissfrom the electrical, although when the bulbs lit up I was awed andat the same time the slave trade, the treaties torn up and the landgrabbed, and my mother burned in her Marine

This morning, I step outside to pick strawberries, no coat. That’s not a good idea, my whole family tells me, one by one, through a half-open door. I’m trying to convince myself that someone is stirring milk and a little honey into your oatmeal. Someone is shaking her head, Nope, you can’t wear sandals in winter. There’s no word for who you are to me. Close is ghosts, though

His car is a nervous breakdown, scattering chrome along the motorway. He gasps through panic attacks in tunnels and medieval towers. The falconry display goes on regardless and eejits in velour have a crack at each other with plywood lances. I’m in fugue state, headphones glued to me as mum calls to accuse him of kidnapping. Come for a drink, he says. No. Retreat to the

If Jenn were a table, she’d be solid mahogany, much like the rest of the furniture in this stereotype of an open-floor-plan space. Except Dan could feel her chest heaving against him, her ribcage pressing into his flesh. He wrapped his arms around her shoulders, pushing her toward the door. She stood in place, steadfast, her back rooted against the wall.

Detailed descriptions of a father’s brutality. Graphic images of a boy, dreaming about food at night, his stolen transistor radio spilling James Brown’s good, good lovin over his pillow. This poem may unfold, in detail, a husband’s violence toward a wife. May run time in a circle. May reveal the husband’s plush red hands abbreviating his wife’s neck on a crisp November