NOCTURNE IN WHICH WE FAIL YET AGAIN TO HAVE SEX IN YOUR PARENTS’ HOT TUB Your breasts at the surface of the roiling water. The smell of chlorine and desire. We divide and assign the space between us. Your specialty is keeping score, mine is pretending not to. We are not supposed to stay in water this hot more than 15 minutes. Plenty of time to pretend we could not drown here or anywhere in the middle of our own lives. Three walls away our children dream of life without us, your parents sleep with their television on. One of us slides closer. One of us places a finger in the other’s mouth, one of us stands, dripping, to reach for a towel. The tub’s motor falls quiet. The air suddenly cold against overheated skin. Absence swells to fill absence, water closes in over the holes our bodies once filled. [...]
Krista Cox
The Size of Things, Decreasing Scale 1) An invitation 2) The gap between the door open and latched 3) Your open hand resting on my hip 4) Kittens past weaning 5) This human heart quickening 6) A young fist full of garden dirt 7) The curve of your lips 8) The tip of my finger brushing your ear 9) Flat headed worms aerating the soil 10) An avian heart beating 11) Your pupils grown wide soaking light 12) A bean seed to be planted 13) My pupils when fixated 14) The distance between your thumb and my neck 15) Bristles on my paint brush, dried slate clinging 16) Strawberry seeds set to germinate 17) How close my lips hover above yours 18) Capillaries dilating 19) Rushing red blood cells 20) A droplet of sweat drawn from the pores 21) The width of a strand of spider silk 22) The wavelength [...]
Letter from the Back Porch Quiet things are passageways to other quiet things. One cracks, another grows. Grass gives up to dust. Somewhere, clocks advance while other clocks reverse, the hissing continuous, a slow release. I would never ask you to come back as I don’t contain ideas like come back or I, or you. In the space below, snouting visitors, they come, they go. Something scrapes and once– the hollow beat of dancing. _________________________________________ Sara Biggs Chaney received her Ph.D. in English in 2008 and currently teaches first-year and upper-level writing in Dartmouth’s Institute for Writing and Rhetoric. Her most recent chapbook, Ann Coulter’s Letter to the Young Poets, was released from dancing girl press in November, 2014. Sara’s poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in RHINO, Sugar House Review, Columbia Poetry Review, [PANK], Juked, Thrush Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. You can catch up with Sara at sarabiggschaney.com.
Better Than Television Her ankles swole up and she leaned on a sprinkler key like a cane. My husband and me had separate beds, she said, but the rug was wore out between ’em. Will’s White Hen He carried her under his arm but when he found her with her feet up in the air he couldn’t eat her. Of 150 lifetime eggs she’d laid 108. Pity. ______________________________ Alisa Golden writes, makes art, and teaches bookmaking with a side of letterpress printing at California College of the Arts in Oakland. She founded and edits Star 82 Review, and her work has been published in several magazines including 100 Word Story, NANO Fiction, Nanoism, and DIAGRAM, among others. She is the author of Making Handmade Books and lives in the one-square-mile city of Albany, California.