Special FeaturerbdChance Dibben, special feature, poetry

Chance Dibben: Our Boring Skeletons Will Confuse the Kids

Special FeaturerbdChance Dibben, special feature, poetry
Chance Dibben: Our Boring Skeletons Will Confuse the Kids
Cameron Kirby

Cameron Kirby

Campfire Song

This is just a bull snort and fly’s ass on the Rio Grande

fine and dandy, that’s the Milky Way

what’s erasing the mesas? What’s out there

waiting for us? 
What abomination lurks in the sagebrush?

In ten thousand years, they won’t know what carved

the canyon—a river or man,

and our boring skeletons will confuse the kids.

You still hope for gold and I still spit for shine.

The dead lizard is yours and the rock is mine.

Take me back to mountains and miracles. See

the seashells on the desert floor. My mistake was

I forgot this was Texas. We are just breakfast

for something bigger. A cowboy cries. Tribes

can’t name satellites but track their moves.

Who’s looking down at us?

Who else knows what we know?

“Alien” supposes loneliness. 

“Alien” supposes something better.

I’ll remember you if you remember--

I’ll bury you if you’ll bury me.

Chance Dibben is a writer and performer living in Lawrence, KS. His work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Split Lip, Reality Hands, Squawkback, Horsethief, Kiosk, as well as others. Find him online @chancedibben

Special Featurerbdd foy, special feature, poetry

D. Foy: Even the Dirt

D. Foy is the author of the novels Made to Break and Patricide. His work has appeared in Guernica, Salon, Hazlitt, Post Road, Electric Literature, BOMB, The Literary Review, Midnight Breakfast, The Scofield, and The Georgia Review, among others, and has been included in the books Laundromat, Forty Stories: New Writing from Harper Perennial, and A Moment’s Notice.

Special Featurerbdd foy, special feature, poetry
D. Foy: Even the Dirt
Special FeaturerbdAshley Mares, special feature, poetry

Ashley Mares: Unclean Hands

Ashley Mares is the author of Maddening Creatures (Aldrich Press, forthcoming), The Deer Longs for Streams of Water (Flutter Press) A Dark, Breathing Heart (dancing girl press), and Killer (Ghost City Press, forthcoming). Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Stirring, Whiskey Island, Sugar House Review, Glass Poetry Press, Prelude, PANK, and others. She is currently completing her J.D. in Monterey, Ca, where she lives with her husband. Read more of her poetry at ashleymarespoetry.wordpress.com and follow her @ash_mares2. 

Special FeaturerbdAshley Mares, special feature, poetry
Ashley Mares: Unclean Hands
Special FeaturerbdPhilip Schaefer, special feature, poetry

Philip Schaefer: Everyone Else’s Darkness

Philip Schaefer’s first collection of poems Bad Summon won the Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize from the University of Utah Press and will be released Summer 2017. He is the author of three chapbooks, two of which were co-written with friend and poet Jeff Whitney. He won the 2016 Meridian Editor’s Prize in poetry and has work out or due out in Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Thrush Poetry Journal, Guernica, The Cincinnati Review, Salt Hill, Bat City Review, The Adroit Journal, Baltimore Review, and Passages North among others. He tends bar in Missoula, MT.

Special FeaturerbdPhilip Schaefer, special feature, poetry
Philip Schaefer: Everyone Else’s Darkness