Heart Mountain in Wyoming

is confronted by their unfamiliarfaces, mangledlaid bare in the verdant grasslike a falcon devours a field mousebloodon the rust-hued walls of a campfirethrowing sparks in your eyes, andthe numbers: 09650, 05653 Peering deeper intothe pagesuntil they can no longerbe read in English For the Japanese- Americans who lived through internment. George Cassidy Payne is a poet from Rochester, NY. […]

Is This How I Wanted it to Go?

A forest away from the pulsationsof thinking. A forest still as raindrops falling off red pine needles.My ancestors. In this forest.I am not alive, in this forest.I know as a ghost knows,a lovely, fragile, shale hunger returning broken from my handshung between the womb andwilderness,as it is born, a great disk-shapedsystem of gas, an accident of the cosmos. George Cassidy Payne is […]

The Heart is a Constellation

Dying almost assoon as it is bornthe heart danceswith newborn starsa constellation of affairs and a great accidentof the cosmos, ifyou can find it had a purpose to mess up. George Cassidy Payne is a poet from Rochester, NY. His work has been included in such publications as the Hazmat Review, Moria Poetry Journal, Chronogram Journal, Ampersand Literary Review, The Angle at St. John Fisher College, […]

Louise Erdrich’s “LaRose”: Lessons on Suffering, Healing and Impermanence

When Landreaux Iron accidentally shoots his best friend Peter’s son during the hunting season, the lives of the two families become irreversibly changed. Landreaux would give anything to undo his deadly mistake, and his wife Emmaline cannot imagine how either of the families—already intricately bound by blood and now all the more so by the […]