Announcing: The third Annual NOVA Woodbridge Writers’ Retreat: May 15th-18th 2013 The 3rd annual NOVA Woodbridge Writers’ Retreat. Each student manuscript will be critiqued in a panel workshop by three writers in this unique format. Richard Bausch, Tom Zoellner and Robert Bausch will read and respond to each student manuscript in one large group. Enrollments [...]
Quarantine by Brian Henry By the time the sun touched the grass beneath my back where I lay beside my wife and son who seemed to be breathing a fog of breath I thought hung above each mouth I knew I had died and was dead though thinking through where I was as if the [...]
The Heavy Light of Shifting Stars by Michael Collier Sometimes the nite is the shape of a ear only it ain’t a ear we know the shape of. -Russell Hoban Riddley Walker The huge magnanimous stars are many things. At night we lower window shades to mute the sparkling circuitry of the universe; at day [...]
Book Nine By Kathleen Graber One man prays: How shall I be able to lie with this woman? Do thou pray thus: How shall I not desire to lie with her? Another prays thus: How shall I be released from this? Another prays: How shall I not desire to be released? —Marcus Aurelius [...]
Providence by Sally Keith The restaurant owner opened the doors to let in the smell from the sea which stuck on the breeze. On the table, a white linen, a low candle, a tiger lily bouquet. The specials chalked in cursive we read from a slate, while the waiter, starched shirt and folded apron, [...]
Erasers by Mary Jo Salter As punishment, my father said, the nuns would send him and the others out to the schoolyard with the day’s erasers. Punishment? The pounding symphony of padded cymbals clapped together at arm’s length overhead (a snow of vanished alphabets and numbers powdering their noses until they sneezed and laughed out [...]
Allison Titus FORMER AUTOMOTIVE PLANT What poor moon deserves this night, Drab corset of grief. I know there’s some harmonica Somewhere, some chicken Feathers and cord grass that might hold The dark apart from the body. But tonight the twilight tethers its husk To October’s horizon and bears down, until even here At the edge [...]
Walking to School, 1964 By David Wojahn Blurring the window, the snowflakes’ numb white lanterns. She’s brewed her coffee, in the bathroom sprays cologne And sets her lipstick upright on the sink. The door ajar, I glimpse the yellow slip, The rose-colored birthmark on her shoulder. Then she’s dressed—the pillbox hat and ersatz fur, [...]
Local History by Jennifer Atkinson Outpost of fish hawk and crow, one drowned oak, one white-blooming pear— Lodged in the craw of the hay marsh, Hag Island. The dock pilings and john-boat long rotten, house timbers sunk in the earth, What remains is rust, foundation stone, and a garden plot of haggard herbs. Yarrow for [...]
The Lightkeeper by Carolyn Forche A night without ships. Foghorns called into walled cloud, and you still alive, drawn to the light as if it were a fire kept by monks, darkness once crusted with stars, but now death-dark as you sail inward. Through wild gorse and sea wrack, through heather and torn wool [...]
