PART THREE And then came the arrests. Came the tear gas, the percussion grenades, the pepper spray, the wooden bullets, the LRAD declaration of unlawful assembly, the kettling and the batons, came the bicycle scouts having returned from recon to sound the alarm, into the sidestreets, over the fence, be like water, the mad rush […]

  I am being escorted outside, held upright by two women I hardly know. I can feel their strong hands, their fingers gripping my forearms, gently leading me with soft determination, step after step into the waiting car.  It is a cold December night.  Under my feet, the stone steps soak up the rainwater, their […]

There’s a picture of myself I’ve remembered wrong for years. In it, I imagined, I am standing next to someone (at a football game, I think) who was never quite more than an acquaintance and putting on an overeager smile. I have shocking streaks of dark purple and deep rich red in the hair just […]

Listen to Sarah Minor read “The Listening Rooms.” https://fenceportal.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Minor_The-Listening-Rooms.mp3 69. The Meaning of Night From her front porch, the woman sees a man walking towards her with an exceptionally tall head. He is wearing a backpack and moving along the sidewalk with a head that is five times the height of a human skull. The […]

I wrote these three poems, and others like them, in collaboration with la smorfia, a southern Italian dream interpretation system. The titles are created using images from recent dreams and the corresponding numbers, as indicated in la smorfia. Instead of using the numbers to play the lotto (the traditional use, which I’ve tried unluckily), the numbers here […]