When I open a book I am always in a position to find something—information, a thrill, a moral insight, a happy turn of words—but to find an actual something in a book, an object I wasn’t looking for, stirs up an awareness, often an uncanny one, that somebody was there before me. An unexpected channel … Read more
I got called in to a little dark room, windowless. Mrs. Lopez showed me a picture book. Khang, I say. No, river, she says. Liver, I say. Not liver, it’s river, she says. That’s what I said, river, river, river, khang— It’s a khang! She shook her head. Look at my mouth, she says, RRRRR … Read more
The freshly painted green gate doors swing out. The slow drive up the windy hill. Eternity. Where the hell am I. Top. A middle-aged man is standing in front of what seems to be the office. Mom pops open the trunk so I can get my duffel bag. My lack of upper body strength doesn’t … Read more
When baking something fluffy like divinity you always want to allow the eggs to get old first let them sit out of the fridge for a couple days Although I am sure there’s a reactive chemical explanation, I don’t understand the science of it, but it’s one of the few truths my mother told me … Read more
hood of blank sky a white man dragged
behind a ford wrists tied to a strong rope
in the truck cab two men drink rainier
beer the wailings of jimi hendrix drown
out the screams of the dying man
they bury him above a riverbank two
deer watch silently chewing leaves with
blank glassy eyes skeletal white bodies
of streamside cottonwoods standing in
careless witness as the final shovel-
fuls of wet earth are tossed on the pale
limp body
The people in the health food store don’t look healthy which is why they’re here. I’m here to get carrot chips, craving crunch, flavor, after visiting my mother at the home where flavor only appears in faint whiffs of memory, where people in wheelchairs suspiciously eye the applesauce on their trays delivered…
She sits on her bed all day every day, wearing nothing but a stained smock from yesterday’s closet. She holds a long white candle under her chin but never lights it. She is out of matches. No evidence of nourishment, she’s sustained by watching clouds hump like the oversized white cushions…
Nothing happens to me. Gods have forgotten me. People don’t notice me. My name is Baarish which means rain in Urdu. I am twenty-seven years old. People say I am passing through my golden years. But since my older brother’s death, life has been as dry as truth. I want manipulation. I want kneading…
Jesse Hauk Shera was a librarian and a prolific beautiful writer who has been dead quite a few years and with whom I am newly in love. Completely smitten. I often fall in love with the dead. In fact, I often wait for people to die before falling in love with them.
Get inside a sequined dream. Quiet girl on whose quiet back, on whose upright lips— a line to break open. Fissure of words against memory’s stone— a song in one ear.
You will soon cleave away from your night like a fish, in the direction of your father who has eaten from grief, who leapt inside his fish. And you forget your mother blue who feels in her kitchen, who prays for you. While you collect dust like an old figurine; your heart…
Explosions in the sky bursting with the sound and all these echoing vibrations rattling through the field around me – me and Nick, side by side in the wet tall grass with the heat and the bugs and the perspiration, on vacation, our summer vacation, Nick at my side eyeing explosions in the sky,…
She starts with bookcases, ingenious designs that hinge on the shelves, the sides, ready to fold on a moment’s notice. Her lover holds disdain, like the shelves hold books she reads each night, and folds dreams in their pages. She covets a foam bed that folds into a couch. Even her…
Native to the bush are black boys, now called grass trees, that grow two centimeters a year. In private, my aunt still uses their old name. Inland, dust combusts. Fires preserve the continent’s aboriginal species: Australian bush, California brush. Oceans spew updrafts, too weak to hold accumulated weight of rain that pelts the … Read more
I imagine the Office of Signage within the Department of Public Works has a book of haiku lying open on a table with an interesting shape, and the Director, a thoughtful man of very few words, is steering a hot cup of tea with both hands up to his lips, staring meditatively out a window … Read more
There’s a girl in Mexico I’ve never met Who wears my clothes And I’m told cries with joy Each time the old man From her church Drives up her dirt road And delivers paper bags Filled with clothes From across the border We are the same Blouse and shoe size Same pant size too … Read more
As a myth worthy of belief, the dusk will do. A last glittering in the marsh where the wind has finally died and night stretches out like a long body breathing over the grassy water. In Milwaukee this afternoon, an old woman who had packed her only life in two plastic sacks screamed, … Read more
I drove into the wall just to feel something concrete. My sedan erupted into a darkening field, where purple loosestrife begged for wind. Paranoid drained of body, who else is there to stand on? I stand to agree with soil— We miss our wetness and are sick of waiting for beetles to come … Read more
I stand behind you My pelvis flush against your backside To hold unsteady legs in place The two of us squeezed in the can My hands, experienced at working in the dark, Unbutton your Wrangler jeans Faded from glory days long past Days when farmers didn’t wear sunscreen And a good day’s work paid all … Read more
Lungs, you say, are the unimagined house inside the body, the breathing universe with the breadth of snow and silence and the Trachea is a lonely brown thrasher singing the longest love song in history. We lie in bed, gaze at the phosphorescent stars stuck to the ceiling and wall, constellations collide with the dresser, … Read more
Two Hawks Quarterly Editors, Spring 2012 Laura Hoel (not pictured) Ruth Larson (not pictured) Carrie Likeness Kimberly Peterson Ligiah Villalobos (not pictured) Margaret Burby (not pictured) Terri Daskalakis Norman Golden Joanna Grey-Perez (not pictured) Auguste Hill 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 … Read more
The Winter 2011 issue features Creative Nonfiction from Micaela Seidel, Genre X from Sarah Long, and Poetry from Lek Borja, Michelle “Strawberry” Heymann, Wednesday Hobson, and Jessica Kincade
Lek Borja Seized lies my body in the latitude of her sex How her desire shines like luminescence in the sea as if the moon were inside it, as in every hour where we enter together Tenderly sink then float longingly so My eyes follow her journey down to its end With her tears I … Read more
Dan Coxon For the first week the wallet sat next to the phone. David would eye it cautiously as he left for work each morning, as if he expected it to burst into flames, or come to life and flap clumsily across the room. All it did was slowly gather a thin film of … Read more
Jordan Hartt (grass buckles in the newborn wind) (the cattle on a thousand hills are mine) (gravel settles behind wheels) (grain the color of nickel waves in dull sunlight) (worn overalls hang off the whitewashed porch railing) (with a farmhand he brands sullen calves) (weathered fences stagger … Read more
