The children are, at last, asleep. Like bright brass plates we’ve stamped them with new names: Peter, Rachel, Levi, Esther, Aaron, Ruth. Each day’s lesson is how to forget a bend of river, word for willow, your grandmother’s hands. We cut your hair. Release it easily as smoke. I promise sadness doesn’t last if you let it go. Learn this new word heaven, a better life that awaits you it is this one. Jory Mickelson is the author of WILDERNESS//KINGDOM, the inaugural winner of the …

yesterday, grace & i drank white wine in bed. it tasted light, like new friendship. we counted good songs & epiphanies on our fingers but the next morning when i smelt the bed stains, the night was already of the past. my aunt is famous for saying life is a series of souvenirs so pack wisely, but my pockets already feel heavy. i cannot bear leaving anything behind. my memory box is kept at arm’s reach – this note from my best friend in grade six, this my freshman essay on world war …

“The bottom of the sea is less cruel than you’d think,” she tells me, four drinks deep at The Schooner Hannah (the dive bar, not the boat), leaning in to play with the links  of my secondhand crucifix. She’s the great-great-grand daughter of shipwrecked Cape Verdean whalers who didn’t drown, somehow, but instead built, from wet sand,  tidewrack, driftwood & clamshell, houses at the sea’s nadir. They fell for subaquatic fiancées & interbred, she tells me, making a life in which …

as always, my life has become the blade-tip of a spade held by morning just before the coagulation of light as always, there is no princedom  in loneliness, a liminal space, the beginning of a godless season twilight’s spokes spin away the sky & like a martyr the moon is forced to burn over this garden on the edge of town I do as I have done every humid evening and hang pulled weeds on the fence I murder the simple thorns  but not before they claw their names across the lines in my …

Those embalmed  and those with one leg Those who go away to work every morning The ones who have children with other women Men who write their dreams down Tailors, male and female alike Those with over-large ears Heroes except for Homeric Some who flew  Women who smell like wet leather Adolescents, male and female alike The ones who have never been photographed Men who refuse to ride horses Sailors …

We take for granted the hinges that guide us to the next room Something my dad once said         Go back now         No         that’s not what he said he said Lean into the gravity of what  you choose          Become the bend         the crux a small ‘v’ managed by the mind that can’t be         touched         in some decent manner,   …