I put you in this box, like the heart of a bird in my human armpit. Pray every day, face the sun, finger the birch tree I stop at, dogs likely shit on, young people kiss near. Unfamiliar with what you were like at puberty, if you saw the hair come in and kept beat to the steady rhythm, like a chicken’s ascending clucks, or the offbeat clack of clipping nails. So much happens over a toilet. When you fold the paper do you anticipate the wipe or are you able to understand why we’re alive? …
Inpatient Procedure Lord I love to aching all this sweet anonymity, to be a pulse lighting up a picture that is nothing like a face, a list of dosages a clear cup of the correct capsules the right dose of sleep & the right dose of waking, walking, a heart blooded but unburdened of all metaphor for feeling oceaning its waves so cleanly across the screen, I want to slip & sleep under its under, let the body tick off my time & tell each machine I’m fine, I’m …
Would not a proper memory of one’s father presuppose a proper father? I’d think so. In the memory I have there is nothing about either it or the father that qualifies as proper. Or usual. As it happens, it is my first-ever memory, one powerful enough to have lodged itself deep into the crevices of my baby brain and body, one to be carried through all the days, years and decades to follow. The thing is, until five decades on, I didn’t know for sure whether or not it was my father. …
and the mother sees it as her job to chisel her out. To Michelangelo her. The tools are sentences like, “You look washed out without makeup” and “you should suck your stomach in.” At the daughter’s age, the mother had to use her fingernails to hollow out space enough to pound her tiny fist against the rock encasing her. That’s how she got out of her block of marble. Her daughter would benefit from the array of chisels the mother had picked up: the point, the round, the flat, the claw. The mallet …
The City Kathryn McCawley The City is a short graphic narrative exploring the life of a young woman in a desolate abandoned city. Having come to it in promise of paradise, the woman is now trapped in a decaying landmark where its few remaining residents aimlessly wander from place to place through a directionless subway system. This graphic narrative explores issues of social isolation, of contemporary urban life’s omnipresent impermanence, and of the haunting sense of aimlessness that we all …
Texas A&M University Press, 2020 Winner of the Robert Phillips Chapbook Prize Still Life with Timex submerges the reader into the mind of a grieving mother, whose distant son has fallen into a coma and inevitably passes. Elisabeth Murawski approaches this subject intensely, rarely straying from the intimate perspective of the mother. She focuses on how grief numbs a person and turns their world into something radically foreign. She pairs raw emotional despair with formal structure …