Screams of Autumn

Emily had just slid a pan of pumpkin seeds in the oven when she heard a scream from outside. She peered through the floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked three acres of tangled woods. Now, on the second weekend of October, they were a brilliant tapestry of yellows, greens, and rusts. “Ryan,” she called to her husband. read more »

This Saturday: Beside the City of the Angels: A Long Beach Poetry Festival

This weekend, nearby Long Beach celebrates poetry with the first ever Beside the City of Angels: A Long Beach Poetry Festival. Donna Hilbert describes the initial inspiration in a post for the Belmont Shores/Naples Patch: Standing around after a poetry reading in early spring with my good friends, the exceptional poets, Anna Badua, Clint Margrave, read more »

ARIEL’S TULIP AND THEIR FAMILIARS

Ah Cai had received Ted Hughes’ Birthday Letters from Eric, who liked to regift books he’d actually unwrapped and read, even scribbled remarks in the margins, as if new readers would then scour other pages to engage with a previous reader-turned-writer rather than the book author itself. Ah Cai liked it that Eric had put read more »

The Morning Reading: “cross the threshold”

I write because to write a new sentence, let alone a new poem, is to cross the threshold into both a larger existence and a profound mystery. A thought was not there, then it is. An image, a story, an idea about what it is to be human, did not exist, then it does. With read more »

Ghost Pains

Dan Wolfsen is the man Mother meets where the employees take their smoke break. She’s captivated by his slow brown eyes and the way he strikes matches on the zipper of his Dickeys. The remarkable thing about that is Dan only has one arm. He’s telling the circle of smokers how the stamping machine crushed read more »