There’s beauty and complexity all around us.

Anonymous

She sang to me sweetly as the sun sat low in the late autumn the willow we sat under danced in the soft breeze as her laughter kissed my face her shadow turned to a dancing wraith it put my mother to the sword before carrying me across the threshold to the place we turned…

I woke this morning when your stubbled chin and its partnered smile (so often the subject   of my affection) grazed my graffitied shoulder with a kiss you wrapped your arms   around me like sunlight peeking through curtains skin smelling like the soap   running through my chest hair last night when you washed…

I rested, naked, as he ran hot water over my body. Gentle hands. Soft and careful across my chest, arms, hands. I thought of you. Desperate, grasping to think of a million other things. You persisted­­—filled with memories I hadn’t remembered. Of being washed in the sink: naked, young, helpless. You must have been happy…

Beneath falling oak leaves and behind the Second Lutheran Church beyond a fuchsia fused fall sunset above Main Street’s hardware store a second-hand ’74 Plymouth is parked and bisected by the early moonlight shadow of the Saturday evening steeple above its interior illuminated by dashboard radio Top 40 tunes softly sent from the transmission towers…

The summer we were nineteen, we’d go walking in the evenings, two troubadours, you strummed our favorite songs, I pretended not to hear myself sing. We knew there was too much life out there to live, to stay inside. We went looking for it, prodding around a comatose town our hands came up empty every…

The day we married, the air was bathwater warm. We finished our vows in the first spitting seconds of a summer downpour. The kind of rain that bubbles over like laughter, guffaws of water the clouds could no longer contain. Unclasping my dress that night, beads of joy-tossed lavender clung to my moon washed skin,…

Lisa Lucking

One small boat pitched on the dark sea — One child cast up on the cold shore. Here is the fulcrum of our age: The bandit wind has stolen the music of breath. Now all roads west are chockablock with broken prams, carts laden with bundled dreams. So useless to write of this safe by…

Kyle Hemmings