Vol 1 No 1 2007

Meena Alexander Judith ArcanaJason Guriel
Steven HeightonRay HsuTanis MacDonald
Yvonne MurphyAlicia OstrikerRussell Thornton
Priscila Uppal Mark Yakich

Accidental Poetry Written by My Father

As She Lay in Her Bathtub, Holding a Flute of Wine

Autumn at the End of The Third Man

Cleaning Kill in the Kitchen at Midnight, Father Made a Good Point

Elegy for Josef Hassid (1923-1950)

Rosebud

Rosebud

A dying man is apt
to be ambiguous,
to recall an odd, unsatisfying
detail that he may then
utter mysteriously
as prelude, a trailer
for the soul.

He shatters a snow
globe because he can—
the dying are entitled,
after all, to release
little blizzards from their
swirling sentence—

and he expects
the afterlife to privilege
that clean tint of white
particular to his
industrious nurse’s
simple smock.

Jason Guriel