Hungry Ghosts

In the damp and cold
limestone basement,
they arrive by night,
bags stuffed to the gills
with heirloom gripes.

They spread lace napkins,
pewter knives,
Waterford goblets
on the dirt floor,
and begin to keen
for bread,
for mead,
for hands of kin
to feed them
the exact tithe
for silence—

 

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Sara Cooper

Knot

In the lobby on the eleventh floor
of the courthouse where we’ve come to be wed
an upscale call girl lacquers her nails more
for the intoxicating fumes than red

so that, dismayed, the secretary who
leads us to the judge—clenching a bouquet
of legally binding forms—says, Can you
believe what people do? And I say no

and then I say yes and you and always
without taking off my coat. Out the window:
horizon of complicated freeways,
each leading somewhere, but mostly

throbbing at the knot; two pillars of factory
smoke, focused at first, lose their discrete
     forms and diffuse into more gray sky.

 

–––––

 

Robin Wyatt Dunn

Breakfast

Pancakes meditate upon themselves
And I meditate upon the end,
Mother on the dishes.

Outside, sunlight is dreaming in a cousin-language.

 

–––––

Howie Good

Subzero

In the dark subzero hours of early morning,
I have been woken up by yips & squeaks,
coyote pups trying to keep warm. I lie there
and listen, & then I am no longer the color of tears.

 

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The Advantage of Sexual Cannibalism

I give a home to the black widow spider
so she can spin a web of strong silk thread
in peace, her webs like comfy beds to seduce
and then kill and devour her mate, to make the choice
to take him out or let him be. Do I want him
as a suitor or as a snack? And when an ex-lover
calls to say that I am pathologically
incapable of being honest with
him, I recall his fear that my darkest
corner was home to a lady in a shiny leather coat
and stilettos, a woman who, if coaxed with a hand
tender and a mouth patient, would surely turn
and face him without striking, expose
her belly and reveal that hourglass of yawning
red, his disbelief that I let them live
with me in the icy maw of that winter, those nights
when I would let him into my
bed but not into my body—

Oh sweetheart, you should know that you were never
someone I cared about enough
to take the time
to destroy.

 

From Antionette’s forthcoming chapbook God Damned Mouth, published by Grandma Moses Press.

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Personal

Woman with two cats and fear of the ordinary seeks charmer with changeable eyes. I believe in cheese. You believe your own best moments. I enjoy paradoxes. You enjoy power tools. You take your coffee black and balance eggs on their narrow ends. You need not read. You hustle pool into an art form or a philosophy or both. If you’re a belligerent drunk, I’ll get in your car. Must love enactments of martyrdom. Must sing along with songs about begging and knees. Must lie with conviction. Must refuse to leave.

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