What are birds In the night If not air's flat iron Of bone, the river's mercy Sings, a darker cadence— Do you know The place I mean No trains run there There are no birds to speak of. At first glance the world is always terrifying Then beautiful, then terrifying again– Where do they put all of the things we've seen After we go, who will speak of the snow That fell across our life In perfect layers of mute blue hush It's dark Here. It is morning. It is almost as it never was. I was happy to have seen What little of the world I saw. Pain gave me more than it took. There was never enough beauty For any of us. I could say more But the words don't feel right. I'll leave it at that.
James Diaz is the author of This Someone I Call Stranger (Indolent Books) and All Things Beautiful Are Bent (Alien Buddha) as well as the founding editor of Anti-Heroin Chic. Their work has appeared in Thrush Poetry Journal, Corporeal, Rust + Moth, and Cleaver Magazine. They reside in upstate New York.
Editor-in-Chief Laura Lee Washburn is the Director of Creative Writing at Pittsburg State University in Kansas, and the author of This Good Warm Place: 10th Anniversary Expanded Edition (March Street) and Watching the Contortionists (Palanquin Chapbook Prize). Her poetry has appeared in such journals as TheNewVerse.News, Carolina Quarterly, Ninth Letter, The Sun, and Valparaiso Review. Harbor Review’s microchap prize is named in her honor. She expects her next collection, The Book of Stolen Images (Meadowlark) to be out in a few months.
The Coop: A Poetry Cooperative 