Online Exclusives

I had an idea of this, is stacked with song
& cool blood, bruised with salad herbs & oil 
Of petrae, callt oil of peter, salts, flats, larks. 
Wet feathers continue to rise in my breast [...]

They come with the bearing of a retrovirus. Their bodies synchronize in certainty. An idea bustling between their eyebrows and taming their strangeness, bundling gesture between their eyes. After a brief survey of the place, the man in the wheelchair makes a sign to the accompanying blonde, and she holds the handlebars, sliding him on the irregular pavement. [...]

There were all these tricks
We used to navigate

The night sky including
Having it out midsentence [...]

While my mother was between men, she took me to an open house. She did things like this. We followed the realtor through the rooms for a while before my mother sent me off. “Little girl,” pleaded the realtor, but I no longer answered to that call. [...]

But if you stand just far enough away the lines move, the painting engulfs and absorbs you in its patterns, in its rhythms, so that there isn’t anything else but the paint, the lines, the motion. [...]

People in my field had to know the whens and hows of doing a bad thing. Good judgment was hard to exercise; it was hard sometimes to hobble a man with a ball peen hammer and call that good. Judgment wasn’t even the word for it. Maybe consistency.  [...]

A sequence of similar bodies conc-
els the flag and forms an   unviewable parade: [Imag-
ine our largest organ, iterating]. As it    moves through
worn thresholds, security checks, it is a distress signal,
only to turn into a transitory marker of distance. [...]

The hound dog universe deceives the deception of sound—cleansing it, that is, into what we might call “the great ear of poetry.” Witness: the silk of a hound ear dragging the ground, the dog baying at the coon in the terrified tree. [...]

Hard to say if the reading process is at all improved by this, but the figurines exude a degree of charm. These are produced not on a flat substrate but in three dimensions in successive layers: The ink is substrate and substance in one. [...]

Two thousand years ago, the Roman poet Lucretius wrote the first poem about atoms. He described in De Rerum Natura a universe of invisible, indivisible particles which composed our world, long before there was experimental evidence that atoms were real. [...]

The entwined history of typography, love, and madness is well-documented: The reader will perhaps recall several typefaces named after the objects of obsessive love (such as Gills’s daughter Joanna, or, of course, Helvetica, named after that timeless beloved, Switzerland herself) [...]

Sheer Kalk Bay Mountain, Kalkbaii’s fringe of steep-stepped houses, Main Road, the train, the tidal rocks, Woolley’s Pool, all close-in to the mountain, then the Atlantic straight out through False Bay, the Indian Ocean off to the east at Cape Agulhas [...]

In the green night there slips
A lamp in the window 
Where burns times’ coordinates.  [...]

He said, “They say the truth always comes out in the end.”

      She said, “But it was spelled out right from the start in big red letters posted square on the door: Inveterate Liars Anonymous. [...]

We are in a middle land. In the middle land there’s no counting, no chanting. In the middle land there’s no scratching, no licking, no shuffling of feet. Here, in the middle, we talk about the breeze; this breeze, here. We are in the middle land and there’s no one here—not me, not you. Here in the middle land we change our figures out of this into sand. From sand we fall—we are falling. [...]

I saw The Great Omega perform three or four times, including that final, strange show. I was ten years old then. It was the summer of the Sacco and Vanzetti trial, a time when vaudeville and touring acts were quickly fading behind the glittering light of motion pictures and the crackling squawk of radios.  [...]

The bee
was all green except for some late
pollen on its legs. The bee
was all green though I could see through the green
body. How is this possible? I thought [...]

The first reported cases date to the period of the initial colonization of the island by the Emerald Empire. According to these early records, the Syndrome was referred to as “sailor sickness’ since it mainly affected the many sailors who frequented Arani prostitutes. [...]

A piece of cheese and some bread

This is what you contemplate as you travel to Mortlake for supper with Dr. Dee: the Grand Conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter, the second such conjunction since the birth of Christ; and the shift from the watery trigon of Cancer, Scorpio, and Pisces to the trigon of fire: Aries, Leo, and Sagittarius.  [...]

Sun in, out, flirtatious, in tandem

with whatever Empire wants
with each brain’s files, 

the women in trenches stroll, the men in tailored trousers power up.  [...]

For three days in the early 1800s, the Midwest ceased to exist. The strongest earthquakes on record tore open the Reelfoot Rift near New Madrid, Missouri. The Mississippi River ran backwards for several hours. A lake in Michigan began to boil and immediately a vast number of large tortoises rose to the surface, and swam rapidly to the shore, where they were taken for food by the locals. [...]

Hey the warp
hey the warp is the graded chunk
that pulls you deftly— [...]

I have no camera 
no game no tent, no word no mon-
strance no belt, no vent no succor, 
no assuage no guilt, no music [...]

Here’s your natural cause.

Exposure, hunger, alcohol.

The flood rushes under the bridge

where some people liked to sleep. [...]

No, I’m not less bothered by his absence than you, brother. How could I be? We were eleven and now we are ten, and yet there is no body, none of us can name the one who’s missing, and what must all of that mean? [...]

Winston stayed in the ocean longer than the other children. He’d stay in all afternoon, even if his neck turned blue, even if a wave pulled him under, scraping his chest raw against the shells. The mothers looked out at Winston from their tidy circle of primary-colored chairs. They’d shake their heads and laugh, puzzled that Winston was capable of such endurance. [...]

Here we have the strangest beginning. Grasses caught in an underwater universe. Any wild animal: deer and ships topmast mainsail lichen rocks. Body like a breaking lighthouse glass. A street of weavers. Tiny precise models of everything. [...]

The lunar sublime,
whose berries, dispersed
by winds’ distant ledger, 
tell of the slumber
of bees [...]

shock of sexual / quake of a ship 
turned toward a strip of land / margining a body
such a headland to do without [...]

In the beginning, the earth was without form. The face of the deep moved upon the face of the waters. Light divided from darkness, shall become light, is becoming light. The earth brought forth great whales, and every living creature of the earth made the earth over and over and over and over. [...]

The Facts, previously accustomed to their modest identities, merely hoped to serve, like willing, reliable relatives. [...]

When you can’t take nothing on the nose but a beak

whose nature we wonder may have particular aims

some purpose her sights are set on when she invents [...]

I have found the edge of this place, which is to say I know how to leave: Drive east until the air gets wet and the kids are chigger bit and stained with jam, or past them until you reach the ocean. There: The water will not be what you expect, will not be the clear glimmer of just-cracked sugar, but a churn of mud and rootless vines waiting to play shark. It is nothing like here. [...]

When she returns from the room at the back of the store that serves as the flower shop’s storage room, she discovers that someone has left a wallet on the counter. [...]

I am caught between             another firmament
speak to me, xylem-bower
oh the vertical                  like death so majestic [...]