There is something spectral about sitting cross-legged on the carpet staring into the center of a flame. Washed with darkness of a blown transformer, candlelight licks at unblinking routers, cable boxes. In thick silence, I whisper to St. Cyprian as my fingers slip through heat the way my mother showed me at the dinner table. … Read more
My reading habits are changing, for lately I open the newspaper to the obituary page first. I’ve always been a rather morbid man, but there’s a kind of pride in seeing familiar names and knowing that after seventy-some years I’m still here. This morning, though, was a shocker. Ed’s name was on that page. There … Read more
In our long, accelerating years, adolescence a dot in the rearview mirror, we could not anticipate this return—clandestine bed in a parent’s house, the startled gasp of senses wakened, the breathless stifle of a not-so-secret tryst that even nearing voices cannot uncouple. We are pulled back to youth, this incarnation made sweeter by the swallowing … Read more
In your mouth, I am trying to find it. I want to suck it from you, take it into my mouth and swallow, I want to hold it inside me in the long weeks we are apart. I want to suck it out, hold it in, warm core around which I can huddle, catch the … Read more
To go along dying and singing ~Cesar Vallejo To go along living and breathing into a world that is dying, cloves knocking into lungs, the bloody raincoat of love, that poor shrub of a spouse spilling always, a multitude of whiny details. Misery, complaints, traffic, the cost of things, etcetera etcetera. Forty years, you’d think … Read more
From your pocket so obliquely you pulled me out and readily, I found a comfortable position in your palm. If your voice is heaven, I’ve been acquainted with it for years. Does this mean I’ve died ten thousand times? I just assumed I was dreaming. That it was my midnight which created your mouth and … Read more
The vigil is over; Martina is gone. Her children have returned to their homes which seem now so strange — the red and yellow marigolds that once brightened the yard look diminished, and a grey film lingers over the sofas and chairs. It is as if the struggle between moments and worlds that held Martina … Read more
In 1964 the campus library burned. The guard dog custodian was engulfed like a skiff in hungry sea. She had tried clumsily to douse the hall, the great oak doors with water. It was a Sunday. Trucks came with red lights ripping the grass. After this event she would be seen, most often in the … Read more
CXXVI. Red cabbage and bronze lilies. In my dream a woman says, I am a radio violinist. I imagine that continents communicate by music, the way dolphins do. Is it thunder or is it coal in the cars on the tracks below, sliding over the gravel beds stubborn as black pearl, baroque? Precious as pepper … Read more
Two Hawks Quarterly Editors, Fall 2015 Pictured left to right: Nusrath Ahamed, Kimberlie Carrington, Amy Ballard, Nick Wenzel, Deborah A.Lott, and Amanda Ikin 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. Caley … Read more
They were arguing when the pear and lemon rolled off the porcelain plate with the windmill and stone bridge bumped on a planter then slid to the floor. If he had not seen it, he would have accused her of making it up. Carol V. Davis is the author of Between Storms (Truman State University … Read more
Predictions have been honed to a science: not just the date, but the hour and minute color will explode on the swamp maples of New England. Do results match anticipation? The way a man rotates a peach and between one bite and the next the nectar turns sickly sweet, small bursts of ethylene gas … Read more
Let there be a shelter for letters from lovers jilted or left to float in uncertainty. A mutual severing does not need sanctity or a trail of correspondence, but for those reluctant to let go let there be a place of refuge. Memories of hair brushed gently from the eyes, an elbow gently cupped … Read more
Under autumn clouds, under white wideness of winter skies you went walking– Denise Levertov for Efim Levertov Tell me what gets inherited? Is it more than a gene for curly hair or the height of a man? You – compact, hands not many generations from the plow, fingers strong to snap the stalk, rub the … Read more
9 Miles South of DC, what Best Places Reports “Modern Suburbs” left out: compound public houses lining Bailys Crossroads. The El Salvadorian teenagers put on their fast food aprons and mutter rosaries for their deported cousins and pregnant disabled sister. And a bald man walks in, his pink head to match the oversized Koosh ball … Read more
The night before last night I tried to kill myself. I opened the freezer and looked for ice cubes. I was thirsty afterwards. There was no one to call except an Indian man on a hotline from Austin, Texas, who told me to go on a brisk walk to see if I could separate the … Read more
Give credit to those who ruin everything they touch, that we might know the beauty of ruin. It’s where we are going. The largest pile of rubble is our friend. Hung-over, the birds go cockamamie in the morning, chit and chatter their way into the channels and sleepy hollows of the skull. Soon I’ll be … Read more
Crazy ruminations in the night. Neurotic perfectionist insomnia. Something I said to a girl in the eighth grade that came out wrong. The guilt of a Halloween egging of a favorite teacher’s house. Calling Karen “Carol” at the mall a year after graduation. Trivial things stuck in my memory as if I lack a filter … Read more
You are not the enemy. You’ve told yourself this many times but still can’t help but feel that you have been miscast, that this role of ombudswoman and authoritarian is very contrary to the wild girl you carry inside you. “Watch the road,” you tell your daughter and grip the armrest on the passenger’s side … Read more
A boy was born. A mother felt betrayed. On the road of her body the arterial turned. The roads had lines. A ditch, as any road might, for rainwater. He came from that chrysalis-darkness. A mother’s obsidian eyes, mostly shut. He was parked in a box to help him breathe. Pinned in hibernation, a needle … Read more
This was a night sheathed in a beckoning darkness: a starless sky and summer breeze, designed to envelop a traveling ingénue. Clothes packed and unpacked again in tattered suitcases— with an absent moon there could be no solace; although silhouettes had been tucked away between all lost stars— her lover’s touch was still felt along … Read more
Natalia wakes me at 5:30 a.m. for work. She shakes my arm and I take out the earplugs that I’ve started wearing to block out the noise of the upstairs neighbors. They wake up even earlier than we do. Natalia and I both start work at 8 a.m., but she works right here in town, … Read more
The tractor brakes finally burned out in Helena, Montana and the boss only wired enough for one plane ticket, so John flew back to Chicago to get another cab and left Jerry in town to babysit the load—a bunch of basketball shoes. Jerry had never been to Montana before. First thing he did was find … Read more
All our poems are buried within us and all we can do is dig. – Jonathan Galassi Remember when we dug up the rusted carburetor in the garden? The torn rubber tire tread, the dirt-encrusted gears? Planting squash and basil, we ate the lead-steeped tomatoes stubbornly all summer. That’s what this kind of excavation … Read more
On the west side near the bus terminal on the overpass overlooking a sea of retired train cars, tucked in rail to rail. They were captives at the station, a soft spray of Hudson River water slowly rusting their bodies. It’s an imperceptible shift, from motion to stillness, but the turnover will wreck your brakes. … Read more
