is confronted by their unfamiliarfaces, mangled laid bare in the verdant grasslike a falcon devours a field mouse bloodon the rust-hued walls of a campfire throwing sparks in your eyes, andthe numbers: 09650, 05653 Peering deeper intothe pages until they can no longerbe read in English For the Japanese- Americans who lived through internment.
The Unpicked
Dogs piss on lilacs and raisinsdie the death of grapes picked Everything changes and thoughtsare just sounds, all moving like strings picked Without wanting to look stupidwe are just kids in the kickball line wanting to be picked Cowards and cowboys and car thieves and cool kidsI become Buddha. I taste radicchio. I am not […]
Caught Between the Hours
Have you looked upat the stars lately? Have you watched the Moon bowor gulp light from her holy grail? Have you howled at her?The sky mother. Oozing through the gate, a vaporous,sweet olive black night in the distance, a coyote yelping
Messiahs
Between colors and worlds,as old as fish dying on the hot sands,because the gods are jealous and concernedabout us, we are stuck to a diamond-shaped rockof slate, just like any savior who cameby ship and went.
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 hands hung between the womb andwilderness, as it is born, a great disk-shapedsystem of gas, an accident of the […]
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.
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 […]
When Daybreak Knows
I am trying to honor her.Her terms. Her words.Her voice. Her mountains.Her wildflowers. Her falsehoods and her fiberglass pauses on the screen. I ama child with her, opening painted windows that werenever closed to begin with.
Littered With Salvation
A flask-shaped bald head olive-black eyes. Short chestnutbrown eyebrows. Oshkosh B’goshoveralls and an ultraviolet purplesleeved shirt. Like small dollspatched with the materials of a day’s harvestsinking into the earthinto a wormhole of foliage, laughing at nothingbut the act of knowing that sometimes it’s commonand good to laugh at nothing. We played unconcealed. Outside. Submerged in winding branches and […]
Home
a small childyet to master the written word knows beautywhen they seetheir mother walk through the door,home from work. A wordless setof hieroglyphics without their brain peeringthrough. 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, and 3:16 Journal. George’s blogs, […]