language

This landscape is alive with wings. Two cuckoos are nesting in the hawthorn by our house. They spend their days sitting high on the telephone wires, waiting for unsuspecting starlings…

2021. My greatest weakness when writing crossword clues is a failure to recognize words’ common roots. This is neither very radical nor very horticultural of me, though I have only…

* * * Barred White Noise and Blue A barred owl hoots—unseen——–heard Dig,—–the cloak of night An apparition—secreted on some dark bough A noisy booger,—–audacious whoop—against constant flood of freeway…

I never knew my lola. Every few months, I would hear her voice crackle through the phone from the other side of the Earth.  On the mantel, I would see…

Alternately mellifluous and discordant, Parker Tettleton’s This Is A City (Ravenna Press) is as much an act of listening as it is writing. Or, to put it another way, there’s…

2.5 mg) This is not a tale of transformation, nor of trauma. The past and future keep splitting away, like cloven wood. Even the present—that urgent word, a disheveled storm—can’t…

“Where’re you going?” Mom called sharply from the kitchen. “Aren’t you going to help me?” I stopped, one foot on the stairs. My eyes were bleary, my temper suddenly short.…

[Photo by Liena Vayzman, Untitled Self Portrait (Eye to Eye), 2018.] By Liena Vayzman   1. Anagram of Alien 2. Rhymes with Siena or Vienna. Take your choice: the sun-saturated South…

Snow Days. They’re legendary. Mythical. Great, white unicorns or whales we chase in our sleep, wake up wishing we had caught or had caught us in the eye of their…

By Logan February   A name is something given, passed like a note that was never meant to be read because the receiver already knows what it says. But I…

In a shaft of morning light, my daughter discovers an eddy of dust motes. Those she says, pointing to what without the sun would be unseen. She runs through them…

There is a small party who are actually of this opinion and who try to show us that, if any law exists, it can only be this: The Law is…

Like other bookish types, I ended up an English major in college. Many of my fellow English majors wanted to teach, but that didn’t appeal to me at all; the…

Photo taken in 2008 in Gałów, Lower Silesia, with my grandmother, Jadwiga Chabsińska née Wilczyńska, shortly before her death. On the art of feeling lonely in language and feeling less-lonely…