High Crossing This part is true.Somewhere right now,a man stands in a car lot, confused.His hands hang unused at his sidesand the sun declines across the highway.He does not understandwhy he is here.The car lot is already closed.Fields of pavementare swallowing the approach of night.The man looks down the frontage roadthen up at the quilted blanket of sky.From here he can see the highway.He can picture himselffloating away on its stream of lightsas sirens echo on the wind.Across the road, the hotel signglows with memoriesbut does not reassure him.He has no knife,no matches, no kindling.Without a fire, he could perishin the talons of creaturesthat come hunting in the night.He climbs…

Vase Behold the vase upon its plinth. A tight carapaceof sang de boeuf reflectsthe light, warding offthe gaze. The narrow neck closely guardsthe ample base, admittingnothing. Only where the lip flares outto reveal the naked ivory throatdoes it allow that once, perhaps, there was a pouring in or out. Suzanne Osborne—after an early career in theater, a stint in academia, and too many years as a legal secretary—now lives in Forest Hills, NY, and writes poetry. Her work has appeared in New Plains Review, Oddville Press, and Indolent Books’ The Second Coming series, among others, and is forthcoming in Southern Poetry Review.

Cold April I read Gregerson’s “Archival”and standing in the brilliant chill of her concluding linesI thought I’d have no further words. For weeks my meagre thoughts—I did have them— had no possibilities.I wasn’t interested in them. This is what we call resourcelessness. Why this does not happen moreoften is a mystery, given that so much of what I readis enviably good. I’d rather not admit to envy; of all the human features—no, not that. Shale or limestone, make me one of them.Call it admiration, then, which it surely also is.So instead: that trespass of violets, the glad slope of them, flockedand beside themselves with we know not how little knowledgeof…