Bonfire Girls by Roxanna Bennett
“Bonfire Girls” by Roxanna Bennett My abortion your whatever, iceberg. Sometimes boys are ways to mark a space with caution tape, identical parks, collapsible homes, your bluebird this ghost word. We’re adrift in an ocean of fuck. Your orbit slow motion, I am weeks without weather. You storm soaked, late, heavy, never gaining traction. Stuck, stuck, but sometimes hurricanes in mason jars. Blame Mercury for...
The Third Thing by Kathleen Kelly
“The Third Thing” by Kathleen Kelly Grandma Agnes, like me, believes all things bad come in threes. My father’s recovered love of whiskey, Uncle Virgil’s violet eyes in milky disguise, the May twister churning at our cellar door. Hinges contorting like Comaneci’s saltos and somersaults. Grain silos gouged, groaning— holding their sides. The auger mangled. Yet her sweet peas survive, thrive even, tendrils...
My Father’s Coat by Christy O’Callaghan-Leue
“My Father’s Coat” by Christy O’Callaghan-Leue I pull your unwanted Army green dress coat from a box of crap sent home with us and lay it on my bed, bodiless, discarded because it no longer fit. Angry because you spoke to my brother’s history class but wouldn’t walk five doors down the hall to speak to mine. Typical. I remove the patches one of your wives had lovingly sewn. Airborne Ranger. Special Forces. I...
Space by Lisa Rosenberg
“Space” by Lisa Rosenberg My father brought home the blue-jacketed, government-issued views of the surface of the moon. Parsed, printed, and bearing the crosshairs of our optics on mottled fields where illusion made bubbles of craters as we watched; my small body tracking toward a moon-cycle still years away. Toward wings I would seek to merit, and a paper to confirm my degree in postulating the deep workings...
On Shawano Lake by Lora Keller
“On Shawano Lake” by Lora Keller I wrap an orange life jacket around my shoulders like a crusty stole. You thread the loose canvas tie through the two silver rings at my waist and tug it tight, twice. It’s my turn, my one time all year to be alone with you. Your sons are still asleep and jealous. Your other daughter is afraid of worms. Our Evinrude fractures the quiet morning and soon we stop at the edge of a...
Does the sea remember everything? I wonder.
Does she absorb everything? Does she keep it safe?
Virginia Woolf
. . .
The Q: Can you fathom the spectacle that would be created if we moved together, arms outstretched, close enough to touch?
The Q: What echoes through you that longs to take form—a poem, an image, a mark, a whisper of becoming?
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fathoms Feb 28, 2026 -
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