This week our staff selects material from a range of different genres, all somehow related to how we make resolutions, and, sometimes, what it means to fall short. So go green or go home, run toward or away….or just read through our latest web rove.

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“The Greenie Pig’s guide to a cleaner, more sustainable 2013” by Elisabeth Kwak-Hefferan (from Grist)
It wouldn’t be a new year without pledges to do better this time around. These five guidelines will help you green your routine whether you’re still us
ing plastic bags or if you’re a freegan.

“Flee” by Catherine Owen (from Canary)We like how the author represents “us” (humans-as-readers) as both something to flee from (as in the deer from the car) and entities that contain selves-of-wildness along selves-slated-to-be “stuffed, extinct” in this poem.

“Neighborly” by Frances O’Brien (from The Writing Disorder)
This flash fiction story is told through the eyes of a woman with questionable sanity but who can only see herself as the victim of the injustice her new neighbors have inflicted.  A humorous voice carries the reader through.

“The Opposite of Yawning is Holding Your Breath” by Christine Reilly (from A River and Sound Review)
This six-part poem lets us eavesdrop on that conversation between opposites we’re always holding within ourselves. But which side to choose? For the pill-popper, Reilly hints, perhaps it doesn’t matter. Anything to be on the outside of the pendulum, away from that center when we can fully see.

“Perdition” by Kristen Radtke (from Brevity)
This graphic essay is as wonderfully surprising as it is brief and simple.

“The Way You Look in Morning” by Matthew Brown (from Blood Lotus)
A rare type of relationship-poem that manages to be tender but feature barbed wire, and, like the fence “meant neither/to hold something in, nor to keep it out”, never explicitly mentions the Other.

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