“Flight Theory,” by Allison Adair
[ezcol_1quarter] Wstawaj, don’t speak, he will wake, and come for you. My hand over your mouth is our goodbye. His black feathers stir, no wind, oil upon oil, his long beak shines. Take this, I have saved it all slowly in a shoe, zrób co mówię, lodge it in the gathers at your waist and never exhale. Run, road to station to the dim nodding ship. Szybko. You will know no one. If you hear me calling you, moja córka, close the door to us....
“The New Morrigan,” by Linda Cooper
She’s got a mango cleaved to her chest cavity, juices drowning the aorta, sweet acidic draining from chamber to vein, and she thinks she’ll yell, but quietly, into the pillow of her sadness like the feathered ape who lost a mate and blindly tools some ants onto its tongue. This morning, songbirds trill the air like a dentist’s drill until a crow caws and caws, silencing her self-pity. Hops...
“Lake as Body,” by Denise Leto
The salamander, black with red spots climbed into her mouth with its pods, its sticky pods and it pulled at her lips: replenished, stricken. Losing the larger frame of sound she was unable to speak, her voice seized in grainy rivulets, lesser dams. The salamander swam beneath her tongue it was gorgeous and frightened or frightening— she wasn’t certain. It kept being a world in there so she wouldn’t swallow its slick skin hiding in...
“Mass Grave, Ukraine,” by Laura Lauth
This is a good story. So good you will forget and walk out into a honeycomb grid of black bark and hay, the orchard’s shifting light—and no one minds that you’re a stranger. Here, they ladder rows of sweet Opal, dividing market fruit from cull. In the meadow below, a man plays violin tuned in perfect fifths—an apple’s slender pedicel or a bird shot mid-flight. Above, mason bees dip and wheel. The Boh river flows past as it always has,...
“Shellacked,” by Jenifer Browne Lawrence
If I step from slick refinished hardwood to concrete draw the door’s body to its jamb with a click, down to the grit where in darkness rows of Camaros Celicas Impalas drowse like horses at the foot of the drooping bougainvillea if I cross the blacktop like a pasture in which no tuft of grass remains unchewed where the potholes are tamped gopher mounds and the scent of ginger rises from planting beds delicate barb driving me into the...
“Storm,” by Abby Chew
No one asks for silence this morning but we give it without question. The dawn, long past, brought a haze of heat, laid it down over us heavy, not at all like your body over mine. Not at all like that. Last night, a storm struck us down. I watched lightning crack the side of the barn, wind snap the bean trellis, toss it up, spinning. We salvage what we can. The sky doesn’t ask if we want our arms slick with sweat as we pick...
“On Hearing the Call to Prayer Over the Marcellus Shale on Easter Morning,” by Marilyn McCabe
How like we are crinoids: lily-like, nervous, as a starfish, many fingered, prying crevice and fissure, regrowing arms with every loss. A cry, a crying, a call out, strange song, predawn trembling: Through the permeable membrane, air metes its punishment: An egg, forgotten, now rotten, its inside resembling something marbled. Things are seldom as hard as they seem. I believe in this, called what you will; and if a prayer can rise me...
“crafting,” by Megan Alpert
let us not bruise a single onion. or throw away a single bite of peach. if you have a home, open it. take in vegetables and homeless youth. patch the places where their mother ripped hair from their scalp. tuck carrot peels back into earth, the onion skin like skin of hand. take in this muddy river. banks rise up tree bottoms, then freeze and snow again. take it in your mouth, the headline: Boy, 15, Charged With Murder. as you are...
“History of Glass,” by Kathleen Savino
Even the ancients knew: Glass is neither solid nor liquid, but in another state always in between. Old windows are usually thicker at the bottom, since over centuries, glass drifts as if it has known warmth. We opened the window gate and climbed out onto the fire escape because it was too warm inside. I leaned against your back, lit a cigarette, breathed until the orange point met my fingers. You told me that you first knew you were...
“The Green Season,” by Jennifer Beebe
The coroner asked if she drank, her throat swollen to closing, front and back embracing the shape perhaps of a mouth around a screw-top bottle, or lips sucking juice from a too ripe pear. I could have told him late afternoon worked best for her, lips to rim, her arm from the window, yardarm, her armistice with the day, the orange of her nails a slow tick of sins along the window frame. I could have told him we anchor ourselves by...
“How to Become a Dyke, Step Three, Birds,” by Nickole Brown
A book of birds. A story in birds. Each breath a bird, each dream slipped from your ear to your pillow out the window a song: cardinals laughing at you—birdie birdie birdie— on a lonely Valentines, then robins swarming the last bits of red another February day, so many of them on the holly tree the branches tick with their picking and you stop the car. But you are so cold, you have to get to the store, and in the florescent buzz of...
“The Impermanence of Human Sculptures,” by Tanaya Winder
The essential “arrangements”— choose a coffin to keep her protected from “the elements.” Given sufficient time we rust like iron, disintegrate in the presence of air moisture and water. The palpable aging of paper. Do we all sleep like marble statues, fixed points in a room with locked expressions? Interpreting the abstract space dangling between waking and sleeping is an obsessive repetition....
“Secrets of a Wooden Saint in a Church in Jalcomulco,” by Mary Ellen Sanger
The mothers look into the lake and see the whole sky. They believe I can keep their children safe. They come, photos snipped to stamp size, and pin their daughters’ faces on my robe. Carmela, Rosamaria, Inocencia, Flor. They come with a lock of their sons’ hair, a snip from his work shirt, a prayer. Roberto, Marco Antonio, Anastasio, Gil. The mothers come with snot and tears to beseech me to caress my feet to leave me field...
“Negrita,” by Faith Scott
Vieques doors closed, shades drawn names that can tickle your tongue and slip in between the blinds and out into the air where they collapse in sudden rain drops and hide in the dust kicked up only with the heavy traffic of bare brown feet if you are careful you can peer between and your eyes might float through turbulent silence with only the occasional grunt and sigh whimper and cry there is a child in the corner there you’ll see...
I have not yet written a single page by daylight.
Harriet Jacobs
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Ritual Oct 25, 2024
