Poem For Dad

My brother called me up on the phone and said Hey Dan dad called me up again. He’s worried about you again, man. Isn’t it about time you started doing something with your life? Like, you know, get it together man, pull it together. Get a life. You’re gonna give dad a fucking heart attack for chrissakes. …more

“Every Person in This Town Loves Football”

Even the nuns come out
to watch the boys in their
gold and blue. Sister Marita,
Sister Anne, and some weeks …more

Family Elegy in a Late Style of Fire
After Larry Levis

In the story no one will tell, my Great Uncle Salvatore
is an errand boy for the mafiosi and how he ends up

on the dance floor of Cocoanut Grove in Boston,
November, 1942, an hour before the club ignites, …more

Stockholder

This view of the mountain puts me in mind
of another view, of a different mountain.
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Flat-chested Girl from the NGO

Know that she
has the advantage here …more

Virginia’s Ninjas

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And Then at the Boat Show

It is true, I feel, that I don’t think about plants
as much as I should. Day after day, the explanation unfolds,
at just the pace to keep you interested …more

Stabilimentum

Bend into my mouth
before frost ends us. …more

Body Politic

History, like hair, grows out of the head.
The whole corpus is lousy …more

Danse Macabre, Mississippi: My Great-Grandmother Fires a BB Gun

There were black-eyed Susans loose at the hip, the limp magnolia
blooms worked
to a quiver. There were white necks

of her Belgian hens sent cracking. The day Baby Grace died
from strep throat, my great-grandmother

chased her son into their magnolia’s
manic tier, fired

lead pellets at the soles of his loafers. That day she lay
her bouquet-patterned
wedding china in their zucchini patch and stamped.
There were bare

feet in her garden, as her garden grew
gardenia-struck teeth—flung shards. My grandfather’s lungs
pulsed like a monarch

on a stone. He smoked
for fifty years, became a shrink. From the tree

he heard her shelling pistachios—the sound like someone’s back teeth
ground through nightmare. There were pistachios

gone brittle, blue at the lip. His mother,
pacing, craved salt as her daughter

cooled under the quilt. There were faceless Dutch girls
in patterns on the quilt, swallowed by bonnets, each one
spaced out from the others, as if lost

in so many separate snowfields. There were voids around each one

the shape of the distance between
a boy in the top of a magnolia and his mother’s salty

breath over her bb gun. There were tranquilizers so heavy
for years, her tongue

kept thrusting. Grandfather, it must
never have been still.

-Anna Journey

Read the Rumpus Review of Anna Journey’s If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting

Recitation
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all the new thinking
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On Some Early Modern Artifacts …more

Elegy …more

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