Two Hawks Quarterly Editors, Summer 2016 Pictured (left to right) Amy Ballard, Caley O’Dwyer, Casey Ash, Mario Gutierrez, Raquel Arias, Zoe Marzo, Nick Wenzel Two Hawks Quarterly Editorial Consultants Deborah A. Lott, M.F.A. Deborah A. Lott is the author of the book In Session. Her creative nonfiction has been published widely in literary journals and anthologies. … Read more
There is a chair beneath the cherry tree. Velvet red upholstery peeling off the yellow foam. There are no cherries left, and no one in the chair. Two emptinesses, therefore, commune in the late cicada silence. I would sit but, look, the seat is wet with August rain.Cameron Morse taught and studied in China. He … Read more
An early dark, instant of rain, then the birds again quicken, and seedpods pirouette all spring long. The world’s awash in whirligigs, the mindless and innumerable attempts to be again, even if only for a moment or terminally, a tree, even the last tree, standing at the edge of galaxies, twisted roots rearing out into … Read more
He joked to Janice that maybe his next job could be writing reviews for the local newspaper, except that he would write interesting ones, since every article in the paper was about some town meeting or how the garbage dump smelled. She smirked. “Start with the bowling alley in town then, and copy someone’s review … Read more
I peel the asparagus’ flattened stems one by one. The grill is hot, sweet potatoes done. Randy says he has to phone Jim and ask about Sharon. It is dusk, but from where I stand I don’t see the orange sky. I usually peel my asparagus with a potato peeler. I slide the sharp edge … Read more
Saturdays were piano days. Each week, Mom eased our maroon ’79 Grand Prix into the Southwestern faux-paradise of Sun City, Arizona, its streets lined with palm trees and tidy beds of gravel. Inside the white barrier walls, lazy herds of Continentals, Cadillacs, and golf carts grazed between the lush grass medians and strip shopping centers … Read more
She said to draw some blood and find a young dog to swallow it and scrape food from the four corners of the table and feed it to him in the morning Take the eye of the dog if a wolf can’t be found and sew it into your right sleeve This cools the blood … Read more
To stop in the garden, to wrench an ear of corn from its stalk, to eat it raw and sweet beneath an August sky: always worthwhile to do this. You could also sell the ear of corn for fifty cents. If you sold a thousand ears of corn, you’d earn enough to buy yourself a … Read more
Heraclitus got it wrong; time’s no river, but swells in waves, a dark sea or the passing wind upon a field of rye. Abreast the mounting wave – and with a rush, outstripping your breath, it lifts your carcass, punches your gut – you’re left gasping there on the packed earth, shaking salt-crystals from your … Read more
The worms have set their tents in the locust trees: it’s another caterpillar summer, a season for gnawing and changing. The silvered chrysalis pendant from the milkweed leaf is lovely, but the tents in the trees make one uneasy, these dirty silk bags with their shadow-play of a hundred creeping larval bodies, faceless and half … Read more
Wild forsythia lean their yellow tongues over the cutbank where storms gouged out the land. Trout that lasted winter hold below the boughs like wind chimes singing in the current. What counts is touch, skin on skin, not the knife sliding down the white belly, revealing white meat and blood. I’m happy enough to know … Read more
They stood in the faculty lounge sipping coffee. Outside, palm trees swayed in the breeze. Inside, women pursed their lips and men tugged on their sleeves. The object of their discussion had long since left the room. The air was stuffy. Someone opened a window. “It’s not that I don’t have a great deal of … Read more
The gun slides back in the drawer the phone rang and I thought my daughter was still alive, stranded on the side of the road with a busted timing belt except there was no sound on the other end of the line. The gun slides back in the drawer and the edges of frosty windows … Read more
“I have been trying, for some time now, to find dignity in my loneliness. I have been finding this hard to do.” -Maggie Nelson, Bluets Dear Loneliness, I feel like a crow-black-wingéd thing. Today marks one year. I tally the days like evidence. I do not know why, or what spherical time patterns do to … Read more
Riding the bus after another day on the same job, caged in the same cubicle where neglected books and paper piles gather dust years deep, I do not feel better knowing it could be worse. Getting off at the bus stop, I ache for my friend stricken by Lou Gehrig’s disease and the coming day … Read more
I don’t want to talk about how rare you are – how you’re far too grand, far too human. I want to talk about the tempest you’ve conjured between my thighs that stings as much as any abrasion on the skin when you’re absent. How you whittle me away into a convex shape with one … Read more
It wasn’t like any gimmick could stop me. I was the fifth train car, that field down the road. You said you knew what to trace – that synapses were defunct. And it’s not like that war could have stopped you. Tonight you’ll play the victor in some other fuck-up, while I watch, as always, … Read more
Above ground between the wheel ruts one dead mole, dark as the earth it turns to, fur soft as ash, against the gray basalt – others claw below ground. Römhild Work Education Camp, 1944Irena Praitis is the author of six books, most recently One Woman’s Life (Diversion Press, 2010), Straws and Shadows (Moon Tide Press, … Read more
The mountain will bask, sun-warmed and green, in the summer we won’t see. The local innkeeper once advertised a fairy grotto in the sand cave where we store shovels to bury our dead. Beyond the barbed wire, gold leaves spin through shafts of sunlight. Leaves, not snow. How we will ache when it comes, from … Read more
They shave your head, line you up under their perforated-pipe shower, peck at you on your crawl toward roll call. They scratch your number in their ledger, stack your clogs, striped trousers, a rag- patched shirt, one round cap. Laundered in another era, threadbare, who’d wear these clothes—prisoners? Criminals? Men like you? We all need … Read more
Wish you were here I mean, not dead me bored on our weekly phone chats, you babbled about the latest bistro, café, winebar on Montague street in Brooklyn and did I remember the Arabic grocery store on Atlantic Avenue? I did. We bought cans of tahini and packets of pine nuts and went home and … Read more
Dr. Z.P., the distinguished psychologist, likes adages. He cites them in Latin, French, English, and his native Polish. He quotes them from ancient authors and from himself. AFFECT LEADS, INTELLECT FOLLOWS is the motto I find spelled out under the image of a Rorschach inkblot, rendered in needlepoint, and hung on his stairway. It is … Read more
After their first child killed herself, the cranes studied all the right books, heads trembling each night as though struggling against some ash-covered morsel working its way down the throat. They treated their remaining daughter the best they could, following the advice of experts: staying tough, no treats unearned, hoping for some sky-road past the … Read more
at the Temple Sagrada Família in Barcelona His thoughts on a nascent spire, Antonio Gaudí steps in front of a speeding tram. He left no blueprints of the temple, only models made of birdshot and clay, whorls to mimic nature’s forms. Eight decades later, staircases corkscrew nowhere as carpenters rev saws and guess the curves … Read more
First position: Your feet behind your mother’s waist, dangling. Music is playing. Your body rests in her arms, your head on her shoulder, your eyes closed. You sway and spin, breathing in and out of gentle pirouettes, dreaming toward the eventual dip into deeper sleep, adagio, adagio, where you remain elevated, where your ankles have … Read more
