These things are true and sad. A painter used to live here. Lives here still but it is complicated. Tonight I am alone but for the flowers the painter left for me to discover in the kitchen, the living room,
Blackmail Fantasy
On Thursday, I take a train to a town with a gas station and one stoplight. Wear a black coat and dream all night about wolves skirting the parking lots. My hope is a single bright balloon caught in January
On the Picturesque
On Wednesday, I start writing things down. They are something like a poem, something like a house fire. We have enough food for a week and the pets all make it out. The trees are sumptuous and dramatic and rarely
A House Which is a Kind of Falling
The proliferation of s’s in your words make me jittery, which is to say, there are worse things than this weather. Me, I’ve been hiding objects in my mattress instead of burning them. Tiny glass kittens, dirty dishes. Writing love
Athena, Goddess of War and Household Arts & Crafts
When you look at me do you see crafty or something more leviathan? I swear my veins aren’t filled with sand, blood does not become me. One spark of my wit could lift a cart of gold, my hair hangs
My Friends Call it Luck
You were lucky even before I knew you, he said. I’ve always been the type to think that luck isn’t something inborn, but it does seem that luck’s dog and I have become pretty tight over the years, she replied.
Nobody Knows the Birthplace of Corn
It was a common gold, so Mayans ate it and traded the obsidian and jade they gathered under the snout of volcanoes. The corn god was the flesh-perfect of male beauty. We cried over the lightness of breaking forth. But
Genesis
Alyse Knorr is currently the assistant poetry editor of So to Speak: A Feminist Journal of Language and Art, based out of George Mason University, where she is pursuing her MFA in poetry and teaching undergraduate English. Her work has
Witness
. . . as though seeking that part of his being which had remained in the hills. –Aharon Applefeld please keep in mind I’m just like you and so I do a little lying sometimes it’s reasonable to assume there’ve been some
Several Islands Have Appeared and Swimming is Possible
Let’s say there wasn’t any other way let’s say my sisters stood by the river and waved hello and goodbye it was all the same but sometimes it dropped its leaves and we just waited sometimes it pointed every direction at once without going and the