The Literary Magazine of the Osterhout Free Library
Pulling Towards Home
Devon Balwit
The east wind sends my poncho swooping
overhead,
startling the dog, already jittery from the rain-streaked
headlights
and the runners, who appear and recede as from another
dimension.
A phalanx of geese wheels above, considering Continue reading “Devon Balwit, Pulling Toward Home”
At the Now Vacant Lot on Bayard
Mitch Goldwater
I crouch to look at crocus blooms in random array
that trail along the sidewalk
and back across this urban square
of fresh-turned dirt and rusty debris.
A man stops his shuffle and stands above me. He has just returned
from the hospital, he says, a week after a transplant.
His skin is yellowed some.
He calls the purple heads
and golden eyes
on their stick-figure stems
Proud. Continue reading “Mitch Goldwater, Two Poems”
Past
Paula Rittenhouse
You act like you’re so special,
So unlovable,
Because you have secrets,
Because you have a “past,”
As if I’m also supposed to find it shocking
That you have a favorite food
Or that you have feelings
Or that maybe,
Just maybe,
You let your lungs inflate and deflate
Over and over again. Continue reading “Paula Rittenhouse, Past”
If
Abby Caplin
If, at the moment
of conception,
the matrix
of your corporeality
got plucked from the shelf
near the stove
of Consciousness,
and “you” were ladled
from the hot iron
rim of a dark-holed
kettle, lucky
if paired with soft
rolls and pats
of gold-foiled
buttery love,
while another “you,” by virtue
of spilling from the same
spoon (also into some horses, several
thousand rabbits, a trillion mosquitoes),
worked in a denim factory
in Bangladesh, your Continue reading “Abby Caplin, Two Poems”
The Cough
Robert Fillman
I am sleeping in the bedroom
down the hall for another night—
having spent the last two away
from my wife, in a narrow bed,
feet dangling over the edge,
unsure how to fold my long arms
as I bump against the rear wall
of the coldest room in the house.
All night, I hear my son coughing Continue reading “Robert Fillman, Three Poems”
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