Love & Danger
The bare garden in spring always feels like a stranger’s. Like the last sentence in a book. Its path circles ground I have tended each season of my life. Have I only dreamed that I know how things grow? Then the dreams… Read more →
People say water off a duck’s back,
but this duck is shiny with wet. Paddling, lifts a wing, shows a stripe of blue. She dips her face into the lake, lifts it up shining— beak dribbling—and all down her throat is wet, and all down her breast, that proud front pushing ripples out and out, whose curve is her muscle. That open mountain, that expansion, that inbreath,… Read more →
Is this Victory?
It feels like whoever lives here never moved in. Like a bare bulb switched on in a vacant back room. Like a portrait of a stranger hung on an otherwise blank box of walls. We all live some days like a body with no head and others like a head with no body. Where do… Read more →
Interview with E. J. Koh about A Lesser Love , winner of the Pleiades Press Editors Prize for Poetry
PAIGE RIEHL: Thank you, E. J., for taking time to discuss A Lesser Love (Louisiana State University Press, 2017), winner of the Pleiades Press Editors Prize for Poetry. I’ll open with a question about the book’s first poem, a frontispiece poem titled “Showtime.” This poem’s title made me envision a curtain about to be pulled back, an entertainment about to… Read more →
We Try On Masks at Dollar General
Which is to say we kissed many strangers today, so many mouths without knowing. Both of us date someone else now, though lock eyes through pinholes of cheap latex, despite the guises’ vacant stares– these two, skeletons. Admire the wrinkles of bendable skull-skin. Remember our bones– last summer, our bodies thin crackers. Could snap first sink of snow but we… Read more →
Extraction
In winter, we warmed our hands over the heat of the open oven, talked about Gershwin and James Galway, Tolkien and the pigeons who pecked the curb outside. Once, a sugar maple blew over in my back yard. The unearthed roots were clogged and tangled with dirt, a blackening half-moon bigger than your silver Honda, bigger than the standing tree… Read more →
Say Grace
You are white marble and tin when you are angry, edges as sharp as soup can tops lined up on the counter. Draws a little blood, smacks of exhaustion and charity. Canned plums for dinner again because you’ve gone to bed on this day the Lord has made even though I made you promise to never let the sun set… Read more →
The Sleepwalker
According to a Stanford University study, only 3% of the U.S. population continues sleepwalking into adulthood. (I) Last night I woke, startled— thought he was lost: milk-starved and terrified. New… Read more →
Domestic Pantoum
The bananas perch in the bowl, severed as a woman’s hand. I am undressing in the kitchen, want you to touch me, severed as a woman’s hand. Divorce me, if you want to, I want you to touch me right here, in the kitchen lights— Divorce me if you want, I know what this looks like right here, in the… Read more →
The Dream About the Witch
we were playing ping pong or mah jongg or ding dong the witch was dead on arrival or at a revival she was borne out or again in a hearse but what’s worse she was cooking the books or with gas up a storm and for looks she was normally over the hill or the flu or somewhere over the… Read more →