After work we meet at Donnely's Pub to sort through this revelation, this attraction we felt for months but until this morning had gone unspoken. It was a flirtation that helped us survive the workday, eight hours answering calls from customers who had been in an accident. Our job was to file their claims, to be patient and kind, to explain how deductibles worked.

They found my brother's pickup in the alley behind Renaker Baptist. There was no sign of him, but they did find his skull necklace and silver lighter. They will call back after searching storm drains, honkytonks, abandoned houses on Elmarch Street. I sit with my sister-in-law at their kitchen table where she has placed a bowl of sweet potatoes and skillet bread.

When I drive past the new baseball field, fresh sod and home plate illuminated from the highway by state-of-the-art lights, I feel sorry for the suburban boys and their expensive bats, plush dugouts, raked dirt smoothed out to prevent adventures. How sad for them never to have played one inning at the oldest graveyard in Cynthiana, Kentucky, where anyone who died in my hometown…

Soon after Mother had gone away, there was always fish in the steamer. I'd started with just the fillets, still battered and reeking right from the fresh meat cuts, and steered clear from the frozen aisle. I could not fathom the thought of setting the bar lower than it already was when no one relative has ever steamed bijou chunks to begin with.

In the middle of an empty bedroom, the shadows are paper-mache tonight. The quiet you've left me is palpable: Like kicking boots off into a corner, Like treading through old towns in snow. I let my anxieties fall to the floor, heaping soundlessly as clothes, and wake from that bad dream. This poem is soft and warm in my mouth,

Tucci's absolutely fake autobiography made my dad laugh really hard. I didn't really get it. Did you? And then, with our pencils out-Colonial, how do we turn this digital writing into something that aches and returns. What's the most reliable printer? The weight of "and I'm hopeful" is a classic anaphora. It's, like, those moments where Tucci speaks with that overaccentuated "g’lottels’top" that reminds me we are haunted.

Sorry, I never earned "Chicu." I, student pushing against the Dutch Masses, read that you said "The Poem is like a migraine." Does discomfort follow? I close my kaleidoscopic eyes against the swirling cream of the paper. What does it mean to glue "the social sphere" to its "mode of capacity"? If I had not zipped up my jacket I would not…

Electric Typewriter , but mostly a musical "I don't" and know if this is the place to say this, but I don't think my drafts are half bad. (I can't imagine they're that half, either.) Who, again, did they say that to? " is a tireless & searching witness" "into any labyrinth." Did Borges think he was going to die at twenty seven?

five four skip a few to maintain the act of my consciousness. Pick at a sticky green dried-on smeck. See, the world were a cure for proper syntax. Caleb Merritt is an artist who was generously granted his MFA by Boise State University and currently lives and works in the Treasure Valley. Free Poetry, #Ranger, Bardics Anonymous and Writers in the Attic have kindly published his poems, art, and typesetting and design.

It's early spring again, perhaps too soon to come see you but I could wait no longer. Spring has not quite ripped off all the sodden bandages of winter. Gutters spew filthy effluvia, slabs of sod have not adhered to bald patches of lawn. I hope your breast has healed, that your dancing eyes aligned. I'm sure you are still lovely,

I lie on my side, staring at your back. Wondering what this child will become. Will he or she be like you, a benevolent man who never picks up a book or wonders about the rest of the world. Happy enough in his on skin. Or will you read anything you can get your hands on, run through cotton fields dressed like…

It's not very homey, too cold and clean. The dead don't leave plates lying around or clothes strewn across wingback chairs. I bring a lavender dress and gray shoes. Whisper to my Mother, "I left the bra and Spanx at home." Embrace your pendulous breasts at last, let them roll under your armpits, let lumpy hips spread like rising dough.

You bring the brolly. When it does not rain, what will you feel like? Overly precautious? Ridiculous? A worrywart? A dolt? Not me. I feel I have a magic power over the sky. There were seven times I stopped the rain by bringing an umbrella. We tape the windows and evacuate, a hurricane on its way. No storm comes. I feel even more super-powered,

What seems like a century ago, we witnessed a New Hampshire canvas painted in cobalt, a field of sparkling stars— pinpoints of white illuminating open hay fields guarded by turning maple as we clung to one another under a Hunter's Moon— deeply absorbed in the moment— dreaming of hours that certainly would never happen. A Pushcart nominee, Dr. Jim Brosnan…

Saturday at noon, my father arrived home from his sixty- hour workweek eager to take his two sons on a three-hour hiking adventure through the woods surrounding the city reservoir where we learned to identify Princess pine and watch a frog hesitate for an eternity to snag a dragonfly. Before crossing the New York/ New Haven rails we placed a penny…

In the New Hampshire cranberry sunset's afterglow we are alone, escaping the notice of autumn stars as your gaze shifts to the blurry borders of a raging current cascading under an iron trestle while I realize dwindling moments of our time together as I caress your face. A Pushcart nominee, Dr. Jim Brosnan is the author of Long Distance Driving…

I forget the small towns and quaint villages left behind in those blue hours before an orange sunset painted the Maine horizon— the August orb glimmering on the Dunstan River winding through cattail marshes where we fell silent, gathering remnants of yesterday's memories— leaving questions unanswered, scattered thoughts half-remembered tomorrow. A Pushcart nominee, Dr. Jim Brosnan is the author of…

She thought there was a bone in the sand and unearthed its ceramic bowl-suggestive fragment. How alive are the old stories that do not require our themes or tired journals? Toothless light shard with bandings, brass stars along a rim and the seven points that should tell all I thought but I could not grab the wet fish and it slipped fast…

My grandmother is drunk, or maybe pills. Ends of syllables like unspooled ribbon on her smokey breath. We're cleaning out a trailer. Sorting through trash to find anything she can sell at her store. A box of Playboys under a bed catches my brother's eye. Mice scurry into darkened corners. Everything smells rotten. I hold my breath, digging in a box of costume jewelry…

Atop the culm bank slag heaps, they said, the black shale turned to quicksand slush. Curious climbers, stained black, laughed, exulted, and then sinking cried their last. Indifferent dust, discarded, pulled them in; exhumed mines crawled forth to smother them. Driving by those gaunt black hills, I'd think of the bones embedded there and blackening. Fossilized among the trilobites, sockets look back…

I sit on the antimicrobial chair next to my father's hospital bed wondering if today will be the day that he breaks the fourth wall. The day he turns toward the off-camera audience, the 96-piece orchestra, or the nothingness on the other side. The day he finally will know, as he has longed to know, if something exists beyond the ground we soon will place him in.

Dusk clouds hemorrhage into the almost dark sky. Gone are the dolphins smiling, the men racing chariots, the jagged mountain range capped with an early in the season snow. Plumed ladies stroll beyond the frame, their prams left behind, forgotten. They, like her, no longer appear as themselves for the hour erases the familiar. Heralds only night. A lonely girl child, once me, recalls a storybook that told of mothers.

I curl my toes into my sand-covered sanctuary floor. Another visit to ask if I ever again will fit between ocean and sky. I prayed it so yesterday in a building where they sang in my grandmother's tongue. She too was taught to search for god on land but found the divine late in life somewhere near these waters. Her faith left marks doctors excised from her shoulders and cheek.

1. I walked down to the soccer field saw a cluster of teens at the playground I didn't mean to listen but caught their chatter a sudden chuckle a meaning I'll never understand all I could see the dark ground glittering under the white moonlight 2. When everything is more than enough one thing is for sure the wounds of the past…

what are these emotions doing here? i apologize to the air, again, with no relief. it has only been survival, poor, for the longest. another apology released from my lips. sick reflex learned young. another way language has failed us, the old man & his shadow. i wish i liked american cheese more. i apologize to nothing, for nothing, by his design.