Pulled from the Anacostia,a remora hitched to the Potomac,Sligo Creek draws its stomach away from the sculpted cageof its ribs, dupe for the trickle-downof everyone else’s appetite, loosening and tightening its beltone single, seasoned notch at a time.Withstanding the wash, neck outstretched, the turtle is engravedlike a cave wall, filled with the fleshof adaptation. We have come from where we have replaced the birdswith sun-phantoms, their woven poucheswith semaphores dripping from …
Giving intocircumstancewe find ourselveslike chains we clasptogether hurrying thislanguage in our limbs ourlips our fragile nerves in paleattempt to cross the expanse wehave failed here to define not surehow much a question of such magnitudewould cast a shadow over this our tender momentyou pause and shift sculpting the silence like a tunnelI count the line breaks as you breathe and let the questionweave into the nest we’ve made letting it go unanswered nothing isbetween us but thin sheeted …
David Felix is a youthful septuagenarian English visual poet who lives in Denmark. For more than half a century his writing has taken on a variety of forms, in collage, three dimensions, in galleries, anthologies, festival performances, video and in over sixty publications worldwide, both in print and online. Born into a family of artists, magicians and tailors, he was raised on oil paint, sleight of hand and Singer sewing machines. …
In the summer between my MFA and PhD, I housesat for a professorial couple from my graduate program in New Mexico. They had a beautiful house: nothing outrageous, just a nice two-bedroom-one-bathroom with a backyard. I loved it. The floor-to-ceiling windows in the living room overlooked the mountains and lavender in the front yard. Those were the two things I had always wanted in a house: French windows with a view and lavender in the garden. In their house I lived a perfect life. I woke up …
Once when I was seven, I locked myself in the bathroom because my brother was threatening to tie a firecracker to each of my wrists and explode me like a melon. It was my cousin Henry who knocked on the door and coaxed me out with a dollar bill. Look, he said, crumpling the bill in his fist. Now close your eyes. My mother always told me not to shut my eyes around a boy, not even my own cousins and uncles and especially not my grandfather, who once impregnated thirty girls and a herd of goats in …
The bottle tips downwardand dye purls horizontal. Before it hits the tableI remember how the elk falls: blood runs across shoulder,vision floods with blindness. Ink rips through skin andchildren begin to yell. The white cotton,bundled into nests, cannot be saved.The hoof still twitches. I remember crying, pleading,will we be red forever? The next morningour shirts are strung up in a line, shot from long distance. Serena Deng is currently a junior in high …