• The Border

    Michael Prior

    Spring 2022

    Its night. I’m not from here. Inside
    I’ll press my fingers against the screen,
    recite my monosyllabic fealties
    while their dog sniffs up and down my leg.
    I won’t be who they’re looking for.
    Once, my grandparents were. Tags tied
    to their coats, they shuffled down chain-link corridors
    and slept in livestock stalls.

    Michael Prior's poems have appeared in the New Republic, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Narrative, the Academy of American Poet's Poem-a-Day series, and the Asian American Writers' Workshop's The Margins. He is the author of Burning Province (McClelland & Stewart/Penguin Random House 2020) and Model Disciple (Véhicule Press 2016).

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    Michael Knight

     

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    Late Migrations

    Margaret Renkl

    This life thrives on death. But hold very, very still in the springtime sun, and a tufted titmouse will come to harvest your hair and spin it into a soft, warm place for her young. Keep an eye on the ivy climbing the side of the house, and one day you will see a pair of finches coaxing their babies from a tiny nest balanced among the leaves. Hear the bluebirds calling from the trees, and you might turn in time to see a fledgling peer from the hole in the dark nest box, gape at the bright wide world for the very first time, and then trust itself to the sky. Wait at the window on the proper day, and the cottontail nest hidden under the rosemary bush will open before you, spilling forth little rabbits who lift the leaves from last fall and push aside their mother’s fur and raise their ears and wrinkle their noses and bend for their first taste of the bitter dandelion. And it will be exactly what they wanted. 

    Stanzas: Hart Crane's "To Brooklyn Bridge"

    Armen Davoudian

    At the time, I didn’t know what a Linzer torte was made of, but I liked the taste.

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