Mark Bilbrey

THE DOG OF THE THROAT


Dear throat:

Given every living thing,

given the farmer’s
and butcher’s slaughter

—in you are the hog’s hearts,
the stalks, and the milk,
and the grain of the wind,
the grain heard, the flock herded,

the swallow, the holler—

what, throat, at your age,
given every sing

—and you cough and collapse
and hack clear a way
back through for so little
a cry as the flies make—

whose moan’s still born?


Mark Bilbrey drags around degrees from the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga, The University of Iowa, and The University of Georgia. He recently taught Composition, American Poetry, Poetry Writing, and Bible as Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside, but presently works for the Admissions office at Claremont McKenna College. Poems from the manuscript he's currently finishing have been published in Versal, ACTION YES, 42 Opus, LIT, Ghost House, and Straylight. He lives in Claremont, California.

Annie Won

a man is playing the moonlight sonata on the piano

there isn't really moonlight. the man has a grey 

crayon and has drawn it all over the canvas

everything muddy. you can't really see anything because

it's dark. moonlight is pretty dim. 

several years pass. the man continues until the entire canvas is 

uniform grey. then he begins to cry. it is so sad,

he says. the brine beads off the cloth. 

he has used an entire box of kleenex.

his crayon is a stub glued to the bottom of his hand.

this is my greatest masterpiece, he says.

Annie Won is a poet chemist aspiringyogi who lives in Cambridge, MA. She is a Kundiman Fellow and a Juniper Summer Writing Institute scholarship recipient, and has previously published in Shampoo Magazine.