Aleyna Rentz IDIOTS made this place. Providence Canyon: one of the seven wonders of Georgia, a two-hundred-foot dent in the ground of Stewart County, courtesy of farmers with bad irrigation techniques.    Imagine the luck: fucking up so massively your failure is designated a state park   where millennial couples in hiking boots climb down the valleys of your ineptitude, taking selfies, smiling,   and park rangers  in khaki shorts and bucket hats patrol the edges of your shame so nobody else falls in.   A photographer twists her lens and aims—merciless!   The ..read more

Thomas Mixon POISON IN EVERY PUFF You can quit. We can help. Times are bad, but what else is new? You clue us in, with each breath, to what more we must do. We failed you. We want you strong and full of vim. Life gasps, and veers off the road when you suck in the smoke. We suck, we have let you down, got you hooked, raised tax on your vice, blew the dough on false threats, big flags, grabbed land and now stand with signs, small, to stamp on your grave stones, your soot sticks, your kind, while you die. Who was it who said fate is the same as a hill built by ants? Was hope part of the quote? Th ..read more

Anne Swannell STUDY IN MINDFULNESS Plums, heavy in a copper bowl. A copper bowl, heavy with plums. —from Rattle #36, Winter 2011 Tribute to Buddhist Poets __________ Anne Swannell: “I am a mosaicist with Zen Buddhist leanings. I become the plate and the china teapot I smash with a hammer. Then I put myself back together again in the form of a flower, of many flowers arranged in a vase and framed in square-cut tile.” (web) Related “Wheelbarrow” by Anne Swannell “Fish Tank” by Sarah Pemberton Strong “Sawdust” by Judith Tate O’Brien ..read more

Josh Parish NEEDLE-NOSE PLIERS Do you know what is never the right tool for the job? Needle-nose pliers. Anytime I use needle-nose pliers   it is with hopeless resignation. I stare at a thing  needing fixing, shake my head, and say, “I guess I could try    needle-nose pliers.” I do not blame whoever invented them. They look like a very good tool. Would you like to twist, pull,    or push something small in a tight little space? Here is a tool  where one end fits your palm and the other end grabs tiny things.   In the middle are even wire-cutters, should ..read more

Carlos Cortez Koyokuikatl HOW LA GUITARRA WAS BORN Long ago, there was a vaquero who rode alone on the plains except for his horse, and his herd of cattle. He was hungry for a woman, but there was no woman for hundreds of miles. While riding, he saw a tree and chopped it down. When he peeled the bark off he saw the wood was a rich golden brown. With his machete, he carved the trunk into the form of a woman. By the campfire that night, he held the woman of wood in his lap. With his left hand he caressed her neck. With his right hand he played with her breasts and tummy. The woman of wood moaned ..read more

Alicia Ostriker ODE TO THE AUTOMOBILE AND HUMAN HAPPINESS How much human happiness can we stand? I don’t know but don’t we all like to drive fast? Exceeding the speed limit is a blast, the cup runneth over running a light and   getting away with it; happy too is a leisurely drive with public radio Bach on the first of May along the tree-lined Hutchinson River Parkway heading north, sun bright, elated not yet to arrive,   remembering the early cars, the first boyfriend and his forest green Chevrolet, its new car smell and his shaving lotion smell, parked on the hill of glowing kisses ..read more

Matthew Gavin Frank AFTER SENZA TITOLO, 1964 painting by Corrado Cagli I promised him I would not say grasshopper, or superman. So Fortune is this fish and this flower, and neither are the body— not some smart flat of a knife. Not some wondering about the stars. The coming into the world insectile, or some dumb gang of coral, smacked with its first air— I can’t look at a fish without thinking how lucky they are to have the ocean. How can they watch the stars? It’s beautiful what must be substitute, their words for night, the different way they hold their fins. How we come into this thin tissue ..read more

Howard Nelson LITTLE RICHARD What was it that gave me the discerning taste  when I went into the record store in 1958,  when I was twelve years old, an ordinary kid (white)  in the suburbs, middle class, to buy the album  Here’s Little Richard? It may have been  the first of the big vinyl discs that became  my record collection, which was for me for a while there  (and in a way still is) something like the Bible  is for religious people. What it really was was  good fortune, and being young and ignorant, but interested,  and being able to walk ..read more

Wendy Videlock LIGHTS TURN OFF IN MAY AT THE GATEWAY ARCH TO ASSIST MIGRATORY BIRDS It makes sense in every sense of the word to turn the lights off   for the song bird, that she may find her way. True, too, for the waterfowl,   the barn owl, the cactus wren— even the mouse prefers a darkened house   in which to nibble her grains. It’s even true the fiddler’s tune   will only begin to dance when under a subtle crescent moon.   If not for the dark, no spark, says the sparrow and the meadowlark—   beware the ones who fear the dark, who refuse to look a shadow in the ey ..read more

Wendy Videlock LIGHTS TURN OFF IN MAY AT THE GATEWAY ARCH TO ASSIST MIGRATORY BIRDS It makes sense in every sense of the word to turn the lights off   for the song bird, that she may find her way. True, too, for the waterfowl,   the barn owl, the cactus wren— even the mouse prefers a darkened house   in which to nibble her grains. It’s even true the fiddler’s tune   will only begin to dance when under a subtle crescent moon.   If not for the dark, no spark, says the sparrow and the meadowlark—   beware the ones who fear the dark, who refuse to look a shadow in the ey ..read more