Looking down from the 16th Floor (Detroit, MI) at the casino parking lot,where five children frozeto death last week. The corner Sonoco–the flashing lights.The endless fracas. Commuters like scugsdashing up and downalong the bank. A Poleteam freighterfusedto the frozen river. In a not distantbuilding, smokebillows up. The Renaissance Centera demolition site.The new bridge a gangplank. Churchescombatting casinos;the congregationcutoff. When summer comes,the muscle cars willpanic the scooters again. So many passing. Kelly Fordon has published two award-winning short-story collections: I Have the Answer (2020) and Garden for the Blind (2015), and two poetry collections, What Trammels the Heart (2025) and Goodbye Toothless House (2019). Her work has appeared in The Kenyon…

Dog At times, I write from a list of wordsgleaned from poemsI point to at random. Clustersof nouns I gather to me—fruitwarmed in the sun. Verbs like release,choose, apologize, glaze the pagein jolts and juices before, yes,the adjectives arrive: crunchybecause of the teens at the caféwith their bags of chips, languidbecause who doesn’t want this worddripping with laziness to enter the spaceof creation, and bloodshot like a challenge,already boasting its many targets.Listen. I’ll only say this once. I want to apologize for the bloodshot sunthat ruled your boyhood. But I cannotrelease you on my own. If you chooseto walk with me further into this lateseason, leaves crunchy under our boots,we never…

Distances there is a linearound detroit.there are borderswhere the horizon ofbroken cement & shattered glassis a bottom line’s dream come true.you cannot heal infectionwithout medicine.what is a new plate-glass windowbut a thousand transparent dollar bills,what is a patched mile of concretebut melted bouillon,taxes turned into road tar.where did that money gobecause if the troll took itto hoard under the bridgewaiting for more goats to grift,then in time the bridge just breaksright on top of himin the richest nationever in the richest nationeverin the richest nationever.oh suburbs in flight,ask yourselves why,ask ourselves, white. Mitchell Nobis is a writer and K-12 public school teacher in Metro Detroit where he lives with his…

Fire Proof In the dream the fire starteddownstairs, as it always does,in the middle of everything, a flaming bowl barely morethan a fist swirling to absorbour book of arguments, the late evening cards, lost socks, the latestto-do list, all atop the cat-scarredcarpet, tilting oddly but still ours for now. I somehow knew we’d losethe whole house, but we had timein the dream. The dog still lived, knew to follow me out to the car,wait on the backseat, the windowsdown, runaway heat gilding the air. In the dream, I called out to everyonewho could hear they’d better run,grab their keys and things they’d left in the dream, and I searched for…

Errands /Aberrance There are objects one procures / for a female child. Ill-fitting shorts. / (The child has too narrow a waist.) / A stiff braided belt. (The child / likes brightly colored things.) Tolkien from the library, / because book smarts are / desirable. I read in the dark, / with a flashlight, until / I am found out. Improbably, a basketball. / (The child dribbles awkwardly, / walking the length of / the garage.) I stay up past my mother’s / bedtime, crouched on the living / room rug. Before a television still / shaped like a box, watching / the Celtics lose. Like it is possible to…

Equinox —After Ted Kooser After days of smokeMy daughter and I Slip out into the fogDisappearing. It’s in The redwoods now,Her small hand Always knitting to mine,And I think about How we can’t see over the hills.And what we can see— Mount Tamalpais’ forestsBut not its bleached ocean side, Pines but not Muir WoodsAnd those last bits Of redwood groves,Birdsong chipping away  Gray dawn, bedded deer,Giant yellow slugs in sorrel. We can see the first glintsOn blue and teal bands of bay At the small point underThe Golden Gate becoming The whole Pacific, but not itsPouring out in some rush Of river or falls 10,000 yearsAway, from this vantage, Possibly…

Infrared —After “Bison Red Sky at Night” by Joe Don Brave, Cherokee and Osage artist. Joe Don Brave paints bison,a single white animal under a silver moon,red sky you could read as heat or life blood. It’s triggering to see the triangularpyramid of bison skulls, waste, mengathering photos, evidence of slaughter. Osage say they don’t know how to live,powerful men agents of destruction,unreasoned greed, a lack of sense, too smart to entertain alternatives.It’s too hot for me under the arborsome years, elders weigh the risk, fall out.  I want to ask Louis, my relativeabout Penn Creek north of Hominy,𐒹𐒰𐓀𐒰͘𐓍𐒻, when bison meandered all the way to Bone Lick, Kentucky.Jefferson, excited…

In the Image A small luminescent face pinbought at the last minutein Jerusalemfrom an artist ofno particular renown,her shop across the street fromthe small hotel I could barely afford. A tortured face, perhaps in ginger hijabor worn tichel or nun’s coif,its ruby eyes and smudged lipswith nose like a cross the artistcould not complete for weeping.A head pinned upon a crosspiecelike on some medieval pike. When I place her over my heart,I sometimes prick my finger,my blood the shadow of the crimsoncloth on which the head of thisthrice-blessed decapitant bled. Mara Gale Fein most often writes of loss. She has been recently anthologized in Look Away Now, a collection of…

The Paleoanthropologist I wish I could go back and meet my parents the year they met. Back in the 80’s when it was still ok to show up to homeroom wearing black leather pants and hair as wild and bright as a bougainvillea spilling over the side of a picket fence. I want to walk my mother home along Fourth Ave with my father beneath a full moon. I want to taste the humidity and listen to cicadas thrumming, see the tremor of the streetlight they kiss under. I want the three of us to get drunk around a fire and blast Raised on Radio from a big-ass boombox so that I can study their expressions through the flames as if they’d been preserved like…

Workwear One evening, by the tie rack at the Rochester Goodwill,(the now-defunct one once tucked into a cornerof the old IBM building), an older gentleman,wearing an oxford shirt and a bowtie, slowly approachedas I ran my fingers through that mop of silken tresses.“Seen any bowties?” he asked, pointing to his own.And when I said I hadn’t, he told me he workedat a local butcher shop, liked wearing tiesbut could only wear bowties. I nodded, my mindinstantly conjuring the hazards of a meat grinder.This was back when I resold men’s neckwearand checked the racks weekly. I knew my regimentalsfrom my repp stripes, my club ties from my emblematics,and my tartan plaids…