Rachelle Hanna (a slideshow)
The Whole of Boredom
Interview with Claire Wahmanholm about Meltwater (Milkweed, 2023), nominated for a Minnesota Book Award in Poetry
PAIGE RIEHL: Thank you, Claire, for speaking with me about your fourth book of poetry, Meltwater, a Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award Finalist and a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award in poetry. Congratulations! I am so drawn to this collection for numerous reasons, one of which is the way you illustrate the complexities of existing as a person amid an ongoing… Read more →
Before
Yellow leaves clung to the branches of bony trees. In the back of the police cruiser, my wrists werered from handcuffs. Raw red like roses, strawberries. The cops found me hanging upside downfrom the apartment building’s balcony by my ankles, caught in the railing. Had to use the cherrypicker to get me down. I was naked, warm. They made me… Read more →
Bliss is impossible.
I believe in it like I believe in the soul of the mouse who died in my driveway or was carried there by some stray. What happens to the pleasures of a half-rotted body? The pleasure given by recognizing a shape still enough to sketch on graphed paper? I took a picture to make my phone’s home screen while the… Read more →
an entryway or an exit
how do you explain bloodto a man, the blood it takesto make a person, that you spenda life stomaching as it leaksout of you in dark hot stains untilone day it begins to clotand make a face, a faceyou will feed, a mouth that willbite you and say your nameback to you, an organoutside of you walkingaway from you, an… Read more →
Bobby Taylor
The woman said his mother didn’t want him because he was the biggest of all five and he ate everyone’s food. I guess even dogs choose to alienate what they can’t defeat. The bathroom is the safest place so I pick up the scissors and cut off what’s left of the puppy coat and his old home. Red blossoms all… Read more →
The tender of clouds
Day after gray day of rain drumming Against the syntax of window panes Until you’re no longer a song you know But a humming orchard of memories Dropping from your brittle body, Blowing from room to colossal room, Up the chimney and into the spuming storm Where even the birds tend their silence And the swarm of words you fear… Read more →
HEROES
why u smell like bananas which way u hang a horseshoe “in fact, i don’t” outside target we snort coke drink fracking liquid zesty, he says this is acceptable in our culture give me an interesting image fishnets ripped a strange boy we know intimately or barely he’s biting his lip found him in a seaside town u will never… Read more →