it's really cold.

by Amy

Falling in Love

with a place is hard to do,
there is dirt everywhere a hand can move,
no space has asked me to be truly clean.

Knowing this I still miss rising
and falling,
in Kentucky I could only truly love

the hills,
truest love I’ve had.
The lover I had in that uncertain place

wasn’t ever ever-present.
Never lined the rearview mirror through fog and later smoke the way the hills did
when I first arrived and when I left for good.

I never told you how I felt
about the hills.
Maybe you would have taken me to see them,

that would have been a desperate measure
speaking up about unreachable things.
Nothing I do now is heated

with the fever, the desperation I had
to touch them one more time before I left.
I did everything all wrong.

I traded water for a boat,
I trapped the sun inside a jar just for when it got cold,
didn’t grow what my love would need to keep rolling on.

Hills with feverish continuity, scaling and then setting just as newly,
in spite of vice for the elements I’d have to succumb to if I had stayed,
is what made me love them best, is what made me go.

Peeling Clementines, and Practice

by mike swanberg

Peeling clementines

this is the only time I put
My historically ungentle hands to real work
The short story of the peel unfolding
Thumbnail pressed through soft yielding skin
Unwrapped now, like a present
From your grandparents.
Gently, infront of them, to show

You are not a creature of such stark want,
Though you want.

Then this breaking of the fruit
Into 12 equal parts and the eating
Of them all slowly

The bysight judging of which slice
To leave for last.

Sometimes the sweetest girls
Have a hard time smiling
Sometimes even a lumbering ox
Stops his chewing to write.



------------------

Practice

Nothing to say for my terrible form
As a middle hitter, point guard, or offensive lineman.
And There I am squatting in the crab grass

someone telling me later, that I crouch down
Like a fucking Marshallese, trying to hurt me,
To taunt me into good habits

But I am the unperfect spiral wavering through
A late November pick up game
The fastball to 1st caught in an ungloved hand
And dropped just as suddenly.
My shriek of pain blending with the cries
Of kids practicing perfect front flips
Off the highdive

a block away
Their naked feet climbing those slick steps
Shouldertops glowing brightly in the sun
They take one step, maybe two and then

End over end holding nothing,
They make themselves learn.