The Baltimore Review

Force of the Sonogram

Bob Haynes - Force of the Sonogram

Poetry

Bob Haynes lives in Scottsdale, Arizona, where he teaches at Arizona State University and online at Writers on the Net. Some of his poetry has appeared in North American Review, New Letters, Nimrod,… Read more »

Jesus Bread

Linda Parsons Marion - Jesus Bread

Poetry

Linda Parsons Marion is an editor at the University of Tennessee and the author of three poetry collections, most recently, Bound. She served as poetry editor of Now & Then magazine for many years… Read more »

Migration

Victoria Bosch Murray - Migration

Poetry

Victoria Bosch Murray’s poetry has appeared in American Poetry Journal, Booth, Field, Greensboro Review, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Salamander, Tar River Poetry, The Potomac, and elsewhere. Her… Read more »

Monologue in a Bar

Lewis Turco - Monologue in a Bar

Poetry

Lewis Turco is the inventor of the verse form called the “bluesanell,” and a contributor to the recently-published Garnet Poems: An Anthology of Connecticut Poetry Since 1776, edited by Dennis… Read more »

Onychomancy

Maureen Alsop - Onychomancy

Poetry

Maureen Alsop, PhD, is the author two full collections, Apparition Wren and Mantic, as well as several chapbook collections. Her poems have appeared in a variety of print and online publications… Read more »

Perfected

Marjorie Stelmach - Perfected

Poetry

Marjorie Stelmach’s most recent volume of poems is Bent upon Light (University of Tampa Press). Individual poems have recently appeared in Arts & Letters, The Cincinnati Review, Image, The Iowa… Read more »

Sleep in Summer

Leatha Kendrick - Sleep in Summer

Poetry

Author of three volumes of poetry, Leatha Kendrick leads workshops in poetry and life writing at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning, a community literary center in Lexington, Kentucky.… Read more »

The House With Only The Sound
of A Dog Barking Inside

Dick Allen - The House With Only The Sound
of A Dog Barking Inside

Poetry

Dick Allen’s forthcoming eighth poetry collection, to be published by St. Augustine Press in Fall, 2013, is This Shadowy Place—winner of the 2013 New Criterion Poetry Prize. It’s his first… Read more »

Understanding Dear Alice’s Dilemma

Emari DiGiorgio - Understanding Dear Alice’s Dilemma

Poetry

Emari DiGiorgio makes a mean arugula quesadilla and has split-boarded the Tasman Glacier. She is Associate Professor of Writing at The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey and a NJ State… Read more »

Onychomancy

Maureen Alsop

divination by means of sunlight’s reflection over fingernails

I read the cues as she walked from the house: invisible glimpses, stars
rising and fading, water rings where winter's coarseness
theorizes a darkening table. She may have loved
the splintered circle her lips
formed as she spoke through knotholes—

On the day my mother died
three dead girls rose up into a knife-fight. Reborn
among saplings' velvet tips their handsome, sunburnt faces
shone clear against smooth gray trunks. The incident of their arrival
silenced the bells across the neighboring lake; the girls
whispered to me the language of their keeping
the beloved was just with you. That night
an angel left a hen
singing in the last of a thousand valleys; questions
cast strange hesitations. Snow in the west corridor. Roses bombed glaze. O,
but the soul had other ideas, a consciousness

separate from the body. Daily I traced the veins
on my temples in the mirror; opening a woman
in the glass. I fingered contrails where the shoal’s depth
defeats the sun—

So I say to myself, so saying to her
as if she were another—well this is one way that we might continue
to speak so that I could go outside into the world soon and love only this other—

But the archivist inside my head
patterned human elements
from bird-scrim pressed to glass, flinted
milk like fire. In dream
rocks make orchestra and shelter. Grief’s capacity

is part joy for its certainty. Her name,
as birdsong, balms the margins.