Poetry
WHEN I FINALLY SEE WHAT NINETEEN LOOKS LIKE by Brenda Nicholas
Photo credit: wikimedia commons 1 There are certain sounds I’ll never forget, like the depressed shuffle of my mom’s slippers on wood floors and words like “I told your dad you might not be his when you were two years old. We were driving in the car.” I was home from college, eager to see […]
ARM-IN-ARM by Nancy Lind
(“Poor Robin! Poor Robin Crusoe!” – the parrot in Defoe’s ROBINSON CRUSOE) When I read, much later, That the father of ROBINSON CRUSOE Died in Ropemaker’s Alley, hiding from creditors, I cried. I cried like the girl I was, at 8, who first met Robinson, And my heart leapt into my throat — No! I […]
QUARKS by Hannah Hackney
There’s six: three pairs of flavours (plus their antis, the inverse always lurking in essentials), then divisible by colour charge, named strangely for another rule of three. The force is absolute, bound invisible down at the heart of things. It charms their bodies into structure with a secret swap of gluons at the white quiescent […]
KEPLER’S TELESCOPE FINDS FIVE NEW EXOPLANETS by Andrea Wyatt
Imagine a huge thermometer, we are pretty close to the bottom not as low as Jupiter or Neptune bluest of the blue, but a little higher, between water freezes and water boils closer to freezes, on that imaginary glass device with Fahrenheit on one side going up the thermometer past lead melts is Mercury, brighter […]
TWO POEMS by Steve Shilling
When The Music Stops Call it what you want. Cakewalk, musical chairs, last man standing. I was a master of it. Walk, walk, walk, wait for the needle on the scratchy 45 to stop crackling out the music, walk, walk, walk, THERE! Slide into a seat and bump some poor, slow, schmuck with bad […]
NO2 by Alex Wilson
Dr. Petrini turns on the nitrous oxide. Nothing changes, he tells me it will take three minutes, that most people think it’s instant, but it’s anything but instant. As the gas takes effect I fight back, counting tiles, listening to Dr. Petrini’s demands to Maria, “Suction.” The opposite of what should happen overcomes me; I […]
EARLY MUSIC by Ryan Warren
It is early in the evening and this pleasant little church, modern, in its way, when it was built, is without ornamentation. Just a large, flat stage for a dais, padded pews descending toward it auditorium-style, wood-paneled walls, reaching windows rising up to the high-beamed ceiling, structured, bright, arcing towards their gentle and progressive god […]
SLOUCH by Gale Acuff
In Sunday School today I thought I died and went to Heaven but it was only a dream so I’d only fallen asleep and when I woke I saw Miss Hooker, my Sunday School teacher, standing over me the way I guess God will when I wake up dead in Heaven, for just a while […]
STRONTIUM-90 by Jeff Burt
My mother wore a scarf and scolded us to warm our ears: we could not chew the snow for soot and strontium-90 lurked in every lick, upper atmosphere churning chimney bits and atomic testing isotopes. My dad laughed how the ash could strengthen bones and the isotope deplete them so if they worked as pulleys […]
WAS by Jed Myers
Her flesh on my flesh, mine on hers, time after time in that thoughtless trance— now I see the two luminous blurs in a cloud of the past. It still occurs in reruns projected upon the expanse before me, her flesh, and mine on hers, times on the porch, the couch, the stairs to our […]
3QR: The Three Quarter Review 