Blue-chip companies take their name from the color of the highest-valued chips at poker tables on October 28, 1929.
(we’re reliable, all-American, safe)
Then comes October 29, 1929: the day the stock markets crash.
Then comes October 30, 2009: me, new to a minimum-wage custodial crew, learning that the most important thing, when you clean the headquarters of a multibillion-dollar corporation, is the executive washroom…
AT LAST, ALICE returns. She bares her bright scars to the class, in a group notice like a wedding invitation or a graduation announcement. She says, “I had to tell my roommates…”
—from “Room Four,” flash fiction about strangers, kindness, and survival, published this month at Five on the Fifth.
Don’t bring a loving family to a broken one. It’s like bringing a knife to a gun fight.
The Jinni’s Wish
A wish for endings
like tied shoe strings.A wish for finishing
like stains on cut tree limbs,
glossy in death
and dining-room tables…
Read the rest in Star*Line (issue 40.4, fall 2017). The issue is 40+ pages chock-full of poetry, available for sale in PDF and print.
Thank you to Vince Gotera and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association for publishing the poem.
Thank you to Stoneboat for publishing Vine in their fall 2017 issue, available now.
Vine
my toes, roots
hands, leaves curling
growing into my loves
like ivy on a chain link fence…
I was partly inspired by the sculpture, “The Vine,” by Harriet Whitney Frishmuth (pictured above).
This is the first poem I’ve published that appears for sale in a print edition, you guys!
(photo courtesy of ketrin1407)
Your wounds are fresh
and still too deep
to paint your surfaces blue.
Only pinpoints of blood
decorate your skin,
like freckles on little girls
before we train them
to blush, gloss,
conceal.
The red dots are petechiae…
my psychotherapy teacher taught me to counsel
with his fingernails…
a deliberate inattention,
staring at my nails as if they were
the most interesting thing in the world;
giving space for a woman with wounds
to unwrap them, carefully,
without accidentally being touched…
This is a little piece about my six-foot-long pet iguana, Quiz. I nominated him for “Literary Pet of the Month.” He never officially won the title, but formercactus picked up the vignette anyway. Who’s your literary pet?
Once we get the iguana, we have to figure out what to do with him. We name him “the Quizzical Lizard” and call him “Quiz,” for short. When you talk to Quiz—say, reading from your seventy-ninth draft of Harry Potter fan fiction, which is definitely honing your craft—he cocks his head in a way that suggests interest…
Outside our carnival tent,
sun dries dropped sodas
and hot dog buns.
Small birds peck crumbs
and seem happy…
Thank you to Breadcrumbs for publishing!
I’ve a little poem, The End, in the Fall 2017 issue of Hollow Tongue.
The End
Before me, black tendrils
of hand-writing
darken bleached fibers…
Thank you to Valentina and Kathyrine for publishing.
Anna Kander 