Cindy King
Capacitor (Be Mine)

Cindy King - Capacitor (Be Mine)

Poetry
Cindy King’s work appears in The Sun, Callaloo, Prairie Schooner, Gettysburg Review, Crab Orchard Review, The Slowdown, Verse Daily, River Styx, Cincinnati Review, North American Review, and… Read more »
Joshua Jones
Illustration of a Sea Monk

Joshua Jones - Illustration of a Sea Monk

Poetry
Joshua Jones received his MFA from UMass Boston and is a PhD candidate at the University of North Texas. His poems and essays have appeared in Image, Southwest Review, and Salamander among other… Read more »
Adrian S. Potter
In Which Love Is a Kind of Falling

Adrian S. Potter - In Which Love Is a Kind of Falling

Poetry
Adrian S. Potter writes poetry and prose in Minnesota. He is the author of the poetry collection Everything Wrong Feels Right and the prose chapbook The Alter Ego Handbook. Some publication credits… Read more »
Travis Truax
My Sister

Travis Truax - My Sister

Poetry
Travis Truax grew up in Virginia and Oklahoma and spent most of his twenties working in various national parks out west. A graduate of Southeastern Oklahoma State University, his work has appeared or… Read more »
J. C. Todd
Orison

J. C. Todd - Orison

Poetry
J. C. Todd’s most recent books are Beyond Repair, runner-up in the Able Muse Press contest, forthcoming in 2021 and The Damages of Morning (Moonstone Press), a 2019 Eric Hoffer Award finalist.… Read more »
Meg Kearney
Starlings

Meg Kearney - Starlings

Poetry
Meg Kearney is author of two books of poems for adults, An Unkindness of Ravens and Home By Now, winner of the 2010 PEN New England LL Winship Award; as well as three novels in verse for teens, The… Read more »
Emily Rose Cole
Stricken Ghazal

Emily Rose Cole - Stricken Ghazal

Poetry
Emily Rose Cole is the author of Love & a Loaded Gun, a chapbook of persona poems in the voices of mythological and historical women, published in 2017 by Minerva Rising Press. She has received… Read more »
Amy Small-McKinney
The Doctor Said We Need to Return in Two Months After Further Testing Including Bloodwork

Amy Small-McKinney - The Doctor Said We Need to Return in Two Months After Further Testing Including Bloodwork

Poetry
Amy Small-McKinney’s second full-length book of poetry, Walking Toward Cranes (Glass Lyre Press, 2017) won the Kithara Book Prize 2016. Her work appears widely in journals, such as Connotation… Read more »
Vernita Hall
To: George Carlin’s Fleas

Vernita Hall - To: George Carlin’s Fleas

Poetry
Vernita Hall is the author of Where William Walked: Poems About Philadelphia and Its People of Color, winner of the Willow Books Grand Prize and of the Robert Creeley Prize from Marsh Hawk Press; and… Read more »
Rebecca Cross
What We Knew Then

Rebecca Cross - What We Knew Then

Poetry
Rebecca Cross holds an MA in creative and critical writing from the University of Sussex. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Quarterly West, Hotel Amerika, Beloit Poetry Journal, Harpur… Read more »
Monica Joy Fara
Woman Alone

Monica Joy Fara - Woman Alone

Poetry
Monica Joy Fara was born and raised in Lincoln, Nebraska, and has spent extensive time living, teaching, and adventuring abroad. Current and forthcoming publications include journals such as The Tampa… Read more »

Capacitor (Be Mine)

Cindy King

Call us anything: spirits, specters, spooks— Say what you will about ghosts & widows: that we don’t exist, we’re invisible, that we go naked under the sheets, and leave pornography in little free libraries. Oh, how we messed with Ms. O’Keeffe until she ditched mimesis for yonic flowers— Sweet ruin of a decaying arrangement, biological clock shocked by the red pulse of time… Oh, how we would take your camera and keep it on the nightstand next to our bed. How we would take you in your Subaru, between dashboard and bucket seats—despite red dirt and lousy music. Serendipity, acne, nothing connecting to nothing. Poltergeistly, wet-palmed, the mopey joy of mumbling the same words because they never come out quite right. Pretty much everything moves at erosion speed; those blemishes on the blue sky are called clouds. The world’s mostly tweetups, irreconcilable differences, legal separations, and restraining orders. Forever after, the taxes happily unprepared. Our backs bent beautifully like the workers at fulfillment centers. Everyone’s always endorsing accuracy over precision— closeness of the measurements to a specific value, over closeness of the measurements to each other. Arrows missing hearts, bypassing bodies altogether. (Would it help to get a bow?) Or should we keep throwing them and throwing, everly happy, everly after.
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