First Fox Here in 30 Years!
An adult fox rockets out from the usual darkness between our house and the dark house next door! We wait breathlessly in our dark parked car. The fox glides with its nose aimed low before the steady flow of a long tail that seems to propel its dreamlike streamlined body! It accelerates like it’s late for an important launch, or lunch date with that worried White Rabbit who led fallen Alice through the weird wildness of Wonderland. The fox doesn’t seem to see or smell us watching from our quietly ticking car, or it can’t care as it masters its mysterious midnight...
Read MoreWanting Not an Abstract Horse
but a flesh horse, his dark mane pressed to my forehead. Before the moon’s full, I want his solid body, a book of blood and breath. I need his ears to flatten against my ears. No, I wasn’t horse wild as a girl, didn’t die for statues and books though I painted a black stallion against a hot orange sky. It’s this horse I dream I sleep with, one that couldn’t, like a dog, take care of himself without me, this beauty already filling the space where I dream him, wait for him to become...
Read MoreFeatured Works: Week of Jan. 22 (Winter)
Winter came quickly here in Philadelphia. The week before Christmas, dried leaves still blew around our browned grass. In the past few weeks, snow has enshrouded our area, leading to delays and cancellations, but also sled rides and winter reflection. This week’s contributors examine that turn of the seasons into full-fledged winter. In “Tonight It Looks Like Someone Forgot to Turn Off the Lights” by Jim Zola, winter makes a father contemplate past and future. “In That Winter Meadow” by Lyn Lifshin paints a vivid landscape of the change of...
Read MoreDecember Night
The trees know first. An ice storm is moving in. I’m still holding back trouble I’ve carried around in my mind for two days. Yet some worries are always there. Must admit it has felt like an empty year. At midnight I come to bed in pitch black, but nothing brings relief in the clinging cold. All night I live with cracking branches, the wind refusing to die down, and still awake at four a.m. with my brain beating under this blurred sky. The slim birches, stripped of color, flex down and over in the freezing darkness. Then the sky clears, the white trunks straighten by dawn, as in...
Read MoreIn That Winter Meadow
clapboard sinks into its colorlessness. Pale drift- wood’s banked by leaves. The year fades with the frost. The last maples camouflage where there were deer tracks, leaves eddy around the new apple. Acorns carpet pewter stones. One patch of scarlet hangs on, blazes like a fire into darkness.
Read MoreTonight It Looks Like Someone Forgot to Turn Off the Lights
Moonlight’s yellow blanket covers trees, leaves cling to branches like lovers, the grass too is losing its green. It’s my pulse that keeps me awake at an hour when even the sleepless have shut their eyes. I used to think I was a romantic. Now I know the truth. I stare out the window and hope at least the wind will stir. Or I wander to the bedroom where my children sleep and I listen to soft snores and whimpers, music enough. I know someday my heart will seize up, grabbed by an invisible fist as my father’s was that first day of winter when nothing was green and all the...
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