Spring 2008, Volume 32, Number 1

In the post office dungeon, bronze catacombs have paisley bones.
The tunnel’s easy maze of one choice luminosity under orange lamps.
Like a blind salamander, the intensity of happiness.

A word about red wagons and men with mustaches�
They too arrive here, and later leave.
They wait in line like bread crumbs.
Their boxes attracting colored stickers like fruit flies
though mine is a fig.

The letters used to get seasick or bruised on the back of a horse.
Squalls bumped the atoms and sometimes the scent of rose water up and left.
The eventual hands were not comfortable. That was a kind of insult.
It felt like surgery, or its aftermath, with the gauze.

Forget the rose water.
Set up an outgoing auto reply information relay race
delay of more than four hours
and wait til Christmas to pay homage to the animal skins and vegetable parts.
A hand stitched envelope that used to be a luna moth,
An astounding moth you crumpled like a handful of leaves.

Terita Heath-Wlaz graduated from Brown in 2005 and moved to San Diego where she now lives and works. Her writing has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Court Green, Coconut, Bird Dog, Juked, and 3AM Magazine.

Spring 2008, Volume 32, Number 1

Even the fireflies here are lochetic,
waiting to scoot their lemony asses

right up to my skin, to expose their short
streetlight sparks when I least expect it. Mace

and cloves from the bakery still dusting
my fingers, I grow talons of housekeys

that slash the August air, that sad frotteur
pushing against my shirt. Its little huffs

of damp wood and mud pour a fluvial
soup between my breasts. Behind me the owl

whistles its come-on, and I snap my legs
open and shut, a switchblade in the dark.

Jennifer Perrine’s first collection of poetry, The Body Is No Machine, was published by New Issues in 2007. Her poetry has appeared in numerous journals, including Bellingham Review, Green Mountains Review, Nimrod, RATTLE, and Spoon River Poetry Review. Perrine lives in Des Moines, Iowa, where she teaches at Drake University.

Spring 2008, Volume 32, Number 1

You silkworm garden. You locust come forth. Scherzo, lucre, typo, zapruder.
Everything I have I don’t. Want to top you off? No, smoochy eyetooth.
Flashlight / called whir. Touch could be ouch in your dictionary. Muddy kiss
& weigh the flesh. / Here’s to tutu and tata, fruit loops and the wire-haired!
We went which way, we bent / at the sea. Please pull the clouds over my
body. Why are you always?

Erica Anzalone is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Drake University, where she teaches literature and creative writing. Her poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, Pleiades, Sentence, and elsewhere.