Alone I drove our children hours to the castled park in Carlisle, halfway home, where teens and waterfowl convene. Their voices calling from arrowslits and timbered battlements salved the jagged edges of division, buttressed the gape on my right side. Their cries and the familiar vowels of the Keystone frontier, aloft in the leeward wind, fanned the embers of mothers' love…

Maybe you're planting the seeds, Geri says when I complain how lately I'm not writing, how the garden lies dormant, a tangle of roots and weeds. In this barren span I feel banished from myself, my mind like an electrical cord searching for a socket, an entry bell buzzing angrily in the dark, no one there to let me in.

rooms filled with fake forsythia and rubber plants, a yard—beat up old cars Dodge Dart, Datsun and orange crates— where else would you sit? A photograph me in black corduroy mini-dress, black tights a run at the thigh, smoking a cigarette. I married my first because he bought me barrettes. I saw you needed them, he said. That was it for me.

Stuck, stuck like a not-yet-dead fly twitching on the gluey strip, stuck like duck feathers in honey, wallowing like a thousand-pound pig on its back, reveling even, in squishy mud. Random words, ideas, float about like drunken boats but soon sink to the bottom. I record nothing, don't want the stress of writing, editing, submitting—rejection stings. And the pleasure of acceptance soon evaporates.

I bought a mattress yesterday from a Tunisian salesman, tall dark and handsome, the usual cliché, and in the process, I got high. How did it happen? I'm not clear. Not on weed. Nor cocaine. What is this? I asked myself as I danced through the store, and eventually out the door. Which mattresses did I buy? Firm, medium firm, extra firm,

Heat rises from damp earth and melts the day It hasn't rained for weeks and the pond is low. Even the cats refuse to go out. Petunias on the deck wilt, grow leggy. The lone alligator, crawls back to the bayou. Only marigolds hold their heads high, little golden buttons like Rapunzel whose hair would also frizz in this heat.

Assorted paint chips hang side by side on our bedroom wall. We've already discarded half the color wheel: red vibrates with aggression—blood, battle, New Orleans whorehouses— green vibes with peace-niks, herbal teas, celadon trees, but also suggests hospital corners. Blue claims calm, but chills like the ocean, and depression churns within perimeters of endless sky. Does mood calibrate to color or color to mood?

I feed the jar and set it on the glass, warm water, flour, steady, patient stir. A hush begins to gather, like church before Mass, and from the depths the waking bubbles purr. A towel tents the mouth and guards the rim. The window fogs where hidden yeasts awake. It smells of apple peel and cellar dim, old spring rehearsing bread in grain to make.

Harry is Timothée Chalamet as Michôd's King1, the sleazy artiste, painter of words before his assembled countrymen. He is the politician seated in the church pew, forehead to interlaced hands reciting the Ave while his phone buzzes with another deal. He is Liu Bei, his manipulation like a slow poison, benevolence on the surface but mistrust beneath, shaking Zhuge's hands like a brother, never admitting his kindness is sharper than Guanyu's blade.

For a flicker I handled the trowel dipped my fingers to their second taper of soil Wriggled an aroma from buds unprepared as I was for Prana's musk come from such diminuent mouths, aporias with tongues Alyssum tocsin light on the neck of my mid- night nurse The vernal moon I awoke with arms full of ice meltwater at my…

You held out a hand you said I had left behind Then, in response to my confusion (I held your gift within two of mine) You scratched my skin with a pin and flaked away its paint. Jeremy Nathan Marks lives in Canada. His latest book is Captain's Kismet (Alien Buddha, 2025). Jeremy works in adult education where he teaches communications and explores ways to use AI to reimagine training methods.

before mornings were stained with coffee and whiskey and burning tobacco when things were white as milk and foamy like furry dinosaurs' hugs the air smelled good and life went with it and not much was known underneath the placid surface— I miss you— I miss hovering above that waterline with you and being there— and the push that used to carry us Bruno Carlucci lives on the Amalfi Coast and in Mauritius with his wife and son and likes to write poems.

They came in pairs, sandals humid with lane‑water, the sort that clings to ankles and dries to a pale rim, and I knew the script before the door‑latch finished its chewing. Two women entered—sandals still wet, one folder, one tulip bag bleeding colour. Mother arranged the plastic chairs so their legs glided rather than scraped, the motion of someone who keeps a ledger in the throat.

At this age, I'm watching for signs, omens that foretell the end. A rusty car becomes scrap metal. I get hangry sooner after breakfast, need to pee more often in the night, have to nap minutes after eating. I try to remember the summers past, not count the ones that remain. Put the warning lights out on the dash. Ben Banyard…

I studied them seconds after his birth, marvelled at the rightness of them, how they knew to form like so. Now, they are ten years old, nails bitten to the quick while we watch Star Wars from I to IX. Somehow he contrives lines, pencil-maps his imagination, words tumble into stories. They catch the icy dew which clings to a rugby ball…

Is it selfish to wait for something you know will never come? Is it selfish to wait for something you know will never come? Is it selfish to wait for something you know will never come? Is it selfish to wait for something you know will never come? Is it selfish to wait for something you know will never come?

I watch the zero power bulbs spilling shadows on the front wall, the winter light's soft music is winging but that's not the end. Beyond the curtain at the door, the hollowness rises like a skyscraper, I immerse in the fading horizon, but that's not the end. From this hallway I can't tell if the moonlight makes sullen discord outside the eastern window,

The train moves through a tunnel. Grey when we enter, blue at the other end. We are doors to rooms with doors to other rooms. Do we deserve such endlessness? The train winds through woods leafy with the early greens of summer, leaps from a bluff of green onto a steel bridge riveted above a stream, ribboning braid of maroon water.

I round the corner, Belleville onto Douglas, for the thousandth time, but I'm elsewhere, the motel on the corner torn down, the empty space a blast of unfamiliarity. My dream car is in front of me, though I would never buy it in white. When I was ten, after the moving van drove off, I believed that if I circled the block with eyes closed,

You leave tomorrow, and I want the names of birds in other skies. You are in bed, your hand trailing the bedroom air like a sparrow, the sparrow that flew into the fire-lit banquet hall warm with human merriment and out an opposite window back into the storm. Such is life, pronounced Venerable Bede. How much better, my mother liked to say,

My friend tells me to get a house, big like hers, with spare rooms. Her rooms are spare, all right: polished baseboards, stale air. In her house, talk is spare, everyone in their corners. In my small house, it's a joke how quickly jokes travel. Another invitation. I stop by the dairy my ex-husband runs and buy a massive wheel of Brie.

You raise the blinds, pull the cord, pitch like a sailor who last night released the wind from the sail, scribbled out the horizon line, unstuck his star from the syrup-slow expansion of its constellation. You've loved the dark too much, how it pixilates the dusk, glorious shots of amnesia. Hammered at the gnats of consciousness, tent caterpillars, once drowned the stubborn pole of midnight.

The greens of the world, great spruce shrugging in the rain. A wayward day, I lie across the made bed, deciphering our awkward kisses, the softness of yours, mine too driving, too interested in where. What is there to be patient for? I despise questions that answer themselves, their casual mortality. Is it too late to rescind my hurry? We are coming to our tender spots.

There's elbow room in the old world, analog days stretch uninterrupted long, I drink hot coffee, make notes in a notebook, study a wide concrete wall, ablaze in the white light of midwinger. Three small sheds, padlocked shut, marked by numeric shapes: 4, 5, 6. Are they cells for making love? The light breaks surf beneath the door, licks skin pearl, bronzite, onyx.

For Norah and her brother John It's Sunday lunch and here you are. Well, not you but the ghost of you. You, who slaved in vain in the house of your tall ungrown men and boys. For what reason and what effect? In their eyes, imminent absences. Our new transistor carried us to your one favourite programme across waning medium waves.