ABOUT

CONTENTS

EDITORIAL

ARCHIVE

LAGNIAPPE

MAST

SUBMISSIONS

Two Poems
by Kristi Maxwell


IN THE MIDST AND MATTER OF

And there’s blood hanging like a bat on the back
of a nail bed. What’s worse
than the shower curtain’s chatter as it opens up
to grime?

Socket-stiff, raptor me into a demeanor
fathomable as a meter bowel-stroked with change.
Arrange my voice with ha, ha.

I has it, I do.

Doomed to the blanket
cuddled by ticks, coddled by
the stench warmth stitches onto air.

Cankered lip that hijacks something
from the kiss.

This new care I have like the underside of cake
where no icing gathers. Trounce, trounce, to experience time
as fists marred with heave.

A red vase punctured with bamboo panders to
luck donning its clobbered adventure.

To glide on green into the loneliest pasture

with thighs unlike wheat in the seat of a scarecrow
birds care less about
than the awning where they make a nest of nil receipts
someone points out like a monument

autumn mounts. Its crusty bridle and foot prepared
for what it has to do.

POST

Paperclips slipped on my knees
My knees don’t need or keep
I slip paperclips from my knees
A nd my knees slip to kneeling
My eyes are still slicked
My slick eyes are still and slathered
With the view
Slivers of fish slip through
Black loafers I call sleigh loaded with water
For my remembering
Of them there
And slipping through
The loafers laid out
As from injury