Crazyhorse Literary Journal: Fiction, Essays, Poetry

Trying to mother / these days the Devil courts me, writes his names / in my journal, my mirror, my mornings filled / with hanging smoke

-Wendy Noonan, "Lord, help me eat them bitter words"

Yesterday she walked out of the woods and into a meadow

-Angie DeCola, "Learned Ever to Pine"

& if we put the tree back / into the ground in our yard, / a Christmas come in June / & if we were to unspool gold / ribbons through its lower branches

-Carolina Ebeid, "Epithalamium"

Towards the east the snow-capped peak of Mt. Hood appeared at once tactile and impossibly distant, the craggy summit redolent of both beauty and death.

-Matthew Vollono, "Samaritan"

She is her own apple her own various worm and wax

-Renee Ashley, "She Thinks about the Shapes Things Take"

We were a different kind of fool then, trimmed / stiff by patterns like stars we'd forget / except they held the night and sidewalks through it.

-Jill Osier, "Brother"

Am antsy starfish. / On a mirror above a mirror.

-Greg Wrenn, "Circumcision"
The sun was rising, and we were alone. For a moment, her strained face was luminous in the dawn light.

-Steven Schwartz, "So This Is It"
The best apples are burnt out stars getting time off for bad behavior.

-Cory Van Landingham, "Orchard"

Standing in the wind makes a wilderness / for the tribe to wander untethered by thought / quieted by mountains' grief

-Lee Sharkey, "When I fled it followed when I froze it slid forward"

I was talking to preachy-preach about kissy-kiss

-Pixies, "Bone Machine"
Under ruined branches, apples / fell like hearts.

-Joanna L. Kaminski, "Faith"

I could be thinking of a color, a girl, and suddenly it will be there large, / and gray and waiting for accuracy.

-Geffrey Davis, "Revising the Storm, 1991"

I'll rush along a gypsy camp of a dark street / In a black spring carriage chasing a bird cherry branch,

-Osip Mandelstam, "I'll rush along a gypsy camp..." (trans. Ian Probstein)

The howl boiled up through the soles of Everill's feet.

-Ann Gelder, "Origin"

But the yellow-beaked night / bird - in the moonlight, / in the clover, / in the deep deep grass - / could hold me, / always

-Donika Ross, "Perhaps you tire of birds"

Then comes the sun and draws its cutlass.

-Danniel Schoonebeek, "Genealogy (rest)"
Last night the dog star stood above my bed --

-Peter Cooley, "Imperialism"
My lips have tasted golden bees in the rowans, / spring water running from Mount Funiu.

-Lan Lan, "Mother" (trans. Fiona Sze-Lorrain)
Lucy's baby is born green, face splotched with yellow like variegated leaves, hair wispy white, corncob cornsilk.

-Tessa Mellas, "Beanstalk"
The lake will take on the hue of snowflakes unembarrassed by nakedness

-Daneen Wardrop, "Stir the Lake"
To each house came an invitation, silk-edged / and engraved, to the hanging in Concord in May.

-Cate Whetzel, "The Hanging of Frank C. Almy..."
And when the wind rose at night we heard / the barn swallows gather and land inside us.

-Molly Bashaw, "There Were No Mirrors in That Farmhouse"

Sometimes it was like an actress was playing her, living in that strange cinderblock house,...the border between real and cartoon becoming harder to distinguish

-Jill Logan, "Tropism"

Some days I clean the rifle so it shines, / A steel slice of darkness in grease-stained hands.

-Hugh Martin, "Sonnet, M-16A2 Assault Rifle"
If you were a whale / and I a ship, I'd see you / coming for me

-Kevin Ducey, "Beauty, first whale then monkey"
Forks can't solve it any more than a kettle.

-Steven Cramer, from "Clangings"
All we've built by mind and fist / is ravishingly stealable, in wait / of liberation.

-Megan Grumbling, "The Heist"
I listen to the rain fall like apology, / kneading the pillow to its fresher side.

-Amy Fleury, "Two Solitudes"
In our mouths and palms, death and / the dream of death are one, / thanks to time.

-Christopher Salerno, "Ahead of Schedule"

In the quiet aftermath of this small personal disaster a single / ray of light sliced a line too bright to face a divide

-Alice B. Fogel, "House of Habit"

Drawing stars, and drawing firs, gentleness comes to open the vein.

-Sarah Gridley, "Charcoal"

The flames groped the ceiling, Peter, and the smoke from the pages blackened their faces like coal soot.

-Robert Kloss, "When Are You Going to Finish Don Quixote?"

When they were ten and lost their friends, it took my breath away.

-Katharine Haake, "Diptych: Chrysalis, Prayer"
I love you badly, Phantom, whose absolute brilliance assigns you to this zone.

-Jeffrey Pethybridge, "[Twenty thousand songs]"
Tape me to your eyelids : you'll see why beauty hurts

-Deborah Bogen, "Barbed Wire"

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