Becca Barniskis has a chapbook of poems, Mimi and Xavier Star in a Museum That Fits Entirely in One’s Pocket, available also as a collaboration with musician Nick Jaffe in both vinyl LP and digital formats. Her poetry has appeared in numerous journals, among them Handsome, The Boiler, and Mid-American Review. She co-wrote the Teaching Artist Handbook, vol. 1: Tools, Techniques and Ideas to Help Any Artist Teach and performs regularly around the upper Midwest as part of the bands Downrange Telemetrics and Pancake7. More at beccabarniskis.com.
Vanilla scoops top milky roofs, slide down in the rich heat of noon. Every tongue stretched to every abode— a custom lascivious, neighborly. All the children stoutish. The adults pallid soft shadows in rubber boots plodding through sweet puddles. Gleaming gutters funnel melted run-off into barrels for animals, fattening themselves sick. The daily ritual of heaping more where thawed spots… Read more →
Feathers atop leaves coat the trees. A wild plumage spills down in strong weather and the ground turns into a riotous smear. Guano glues down the loose cobblestones and lightens the blackened stonework of the church; its colored glass windows open so as to fill the apse with constant wing and flash. Here the hymns are hollows carved in air—the… Read more →