Author: admin

(Capitol Hill, November) Behind this row of windows squared against the snap of evening air, light nests like coals. Repointed chimneys plume their hellos. The night grows soft with satisfaction and collecting ash. Tracing the...

first touch of lips together lingering and soft the rustle of prom taffeta when it was crisp and I felt new diligent practicing of an assigned piano piece I hated waiting for a reply that finally arrived and answered no, solo...

A crisp and sunlit, blue-sky day! Evergreen leaves reverently hushed in awe of the arriving season. The still, cool air is welcome chill, like gentle frost or snow on windowsill that whispers peace and Christmastime. And when...

On and on these days, frequent washing of hands has a sinister gloom, fearful, mandated, unguaranteed: Fill hands with water. Make sure that it’s warm. Soap up–not enough– twenty seconds, no less. Scrub hard, scrub...

get together with a group of fellow poets and feel we’re the biggest group of losers in town? Craig Cotter has lived in California since 1986. His poems have appeared in California Quarterly, Chiron Review, Columbia Poetry...

It’s about what she can’t keep—what stays broken—what she can’t fix like her mother’s pearls (the fragile string in her hands), her father’s glasses (the splintering under her foot). It’s about how everything that lasts becomes...

Sometimes on summer nights when I was a child, my parents took me to a drive-in theater, where the moon, high above the biggest screen I’d ever seen, beamed down on rows of cars, arranged in their spaces like lines on a ruler....

In the slanting drift of afternoon, even as night begins to fall, made patterns of thought and intention fade. The air lightens, the trees lose shape, and a hermit thrush in the distance invents songs that move through the...

As a purveyor of the fictive word I took great pride in my worthy writing then a happening of the most absurd gone was my muse with nary a sighting. She absconded with our talents shared my wordsmithery skills diffused to vapor...

A whit of a whisper the words fluttered soft on her tongue of seven years it is a barn grandma not a stable. First riding lesson hands high horses eye low learners in the place of hay and tack. Grandmother And granddaughter spin...

They tore down the Thoreau cabin. Soon after Bill left the college to sell cheese in Walla Walla, crack heads made the outpost theirs. What startled our chair as much as its dismantlement was the number of Bic lighters, not all...

So much simpler then, the time spent across the Silver State table games I viewed through a bottomless beer glass while the escape artists grappled to free themselves from their real-world dreams, the gamblers their vows of...