https://fenceportal.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/Tommy-ORourke-Received-Pronunciation.m4a I am sorry I knocked over your Waterford ice bucket. I get so nervous when you make me sing. What with the wasp nest swelling on the ceiling. What with the hatchet whispering on the wall. I know these things because I’m hungry: dawn comes in like a bow pulled across the strings of […]
Oracle Portraits
Reading Note: My frequent re-reads, to remember the strange, wonderful animal and artist you are: Animal Joy by Nuar Alsadir How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee
Ode to Mud Season – A Vispo Journal
Outside the Children’s & Maternity Thrift Shop Outside the children’s & maternity thrift shop stood the little girl with her dog looking down at the wet sidewalk. The worms are dying, she said, dragging each syllable through sad honey, which startled me— I was not expecting to be addressed, having forgotten the gift of perception […]
Stars Amid Rubble
Ukrainian Poetry in English: A Portfolio from Sibelan Forrester followed by her notes The Susan W. Lippincott Professor of Modern and Classical Languages and Russian at Swarthmore College, Sibelan Forrester specializes in twentieth-century Russian poetry and Russian women writers. An award-winning translator, Professor Forrester has published translations from Serbian, Croatian, Russian, and Ukrainian. She selects […]
Hook, Scalpel, Clamp, Hole
I am sitting at my kitchen island, my hands floating like two pale moths over two sheets of printing paper. Atop the sheets is a standard hospital logo printed in jeweled tones. On the first sheet falls clearly numbered post-surgical instructions, the phone number of a physician. On the second, there is a series of […]
From “The Violet Hours”
Nude Dancer with Aulos by Arnold Genthe. Original from The Rijksmuseum. From the point of view of love, look at this: a bank of purple irises, petals hanging like narrow tongues, the chipped tooth of a lover after tripping in the garden, the blood that rushes between the teeth like a tidal wave. See the […]
