Kate Gale
Darkness Thrown Down Like a Blanket

Kate Gale - Darkness Thrown Down Like a Blanket

Poetry
Dr. Kate Gale is co-founder and Managing Editor of Red Hen Press, Editor of the Los Angeles Review, and she teaches in the Low Residency MFA program at the University of Nebraska in Poetry, Fiction… Read more »
Seth Grindstaff
Fossils of Fathers

Seth Grindstaff - Fossils of Fathers

Poetry
Seth Grindstaff teaches high school English in northeast Tennessee and earned an MA in English from ETSU. His poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize by Star 82 Review and published in… Read more »
Chera Hammons
Ghazal after the Electrocardiogram

Chera Hammons - Ghazal after the Electrocardiogram

Poetry
Chera Hammons is a winner of the 2017 PEN Southwest Book Award. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Foundry, The Penn Review, The Sun, The Texas Observer, Tupelo Quarterly,… Read more »
Dennis Cummings
Kool-Aid Days

Dennis Cummings - Kool-Aid Days

Poetry
Dennis Cummings lives in Poway, CA with his wife. He has sold flowers for commercial growers and shippers for the last 45 years and continues to do so. He recently rediscovered poetry after a hiatus… Read more »
Will Cordeiro
Parentheses

Will Cordeiro - Parentheses

Poetry
Will Cordeiro has published work in Agni, Best New Poets, The Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, Palette Poetry, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, The Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. Will won the 2019 Able… Read more »
Merrill Oliver Douglas
Seeks Its Own Level

Merrill Oliver Douglas - Seeks Its Own Level

Poetry
Merrill Oliver Douglas has published poems in Tar River Poetry, Stone Canoe, Valparaiso Poetry Review, South 85 Journal, Cimarron Review and the Comstock Review, among others. Finishing Line Press… Read more »
Francesca Bell
The Window Before Which We Last Kissed Is on the Market

Francesca Bell - The Window Before Which We Last Kissed Is on the Market

Poetry
Francesca Bell is the author of Bright Stain (Red Hen Press, 2019) and the translator of Kitchens and Trains: Poems by Max Sessner (Red Hen Press, 2023). Her work appears widely in journals such as B… Read more »

Fossils of Fathers

Seth Grindstaff

          at the Gray, TN Fossil Site & Museum I wonder how much guess work paleontologists use to resurrect vertebrae from shadow. Or if prehistoric re-creations actually hinge on a childlike imagination, using scales to patch up what’s beyond memory? For to deny a child his ghost sends him seeking. Like when my foster son thought he saw his birth dad from across the exhibit hall, and there was no denying his chase up stairs or into vacant restroom stalls. I remember reading that the excavation site spread across acres and measured one hundred feet in depth— a sinkhole, an absence of stable footing that holds even the tiniest creature that stumbles into its heart. But I saw Dad was all he said, confident as bone. At the sandbox display he sifted my silence, still searching a sure sight. Finding nothing and separate as sand, we filled our seats to watch a demonstration of careful hands fostering fossils through this disconnected period of half-discovered existence— to be labeled and categorized, to wait in vain for the rest of their world to return.
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