Jessica Anne Robinson spring thaw (ii

Jessica Anne Robinson

spring thaw (ii)

i am craving spring like a dead lung / swallowing sun like dew, sucking leaves off eyes closed and daydreaming sounds of rushing water when i pass the dirty glacier streams still frozen to the face of sloping lawns. i’m in the doorway watching albums / only peaches, and yellows, and greens.

really i / just want to sit in a cemetery where i’m not expected to remember, where the yellow grass might be mistaken for light if your head is not preoccupied. sure, it’s romantic: the feeling of carrying fruit out in the open. it’s an awful lot easier to feel the beat of the ecosystem when the ground has thawed and there’s peat on the ass of your jeans.

Olivia Kingery

Alice finds an antique coin collection

When her grandfather died, Alice brushed her finger over the dust collected on his furniture. The two had played cribbage earlier that week, but now, it was Thursday, and her grandfather was dead. This is how she finds the coins: in the back of his closet, behind long coats and pressed collared shirts, a small red oak box sits on a shoe box. The oak is not covered by dust. Alice traces the sheen of vermillion. Once the lid is open, Alice sinks from her heels and leans her back against the wall. This is what is inside the box: a photograph of her grandmother. She is in a blue coat, white fur hat, and holding a champagne flute with something pink in it. Her neck is bent back laughing, and everything around her seems fuzzy, blurred by her beauty. Alice begins to cry. There is a handwritten postcard, two pearl earrings, and another smaller box. Inside this box, the smaller one, is the coin collection. But this collection is unlike yours or your father’s or the one they sell on Pawn Stars. These coins are hand forged, bent with love and sweetened by the thumb pads of a lover. On one side of each coin is the name of a city: Paris Birmingham Marquette and the list goes on. There may be forty coins in the small box inside the large box which is now resting on the floor. Alice places it back on the shoe box, out of respect, she thinks. But back to the coins. On the flip side of the city names, is the same laughing face from the photograph. Her grandmother’s smile hand stamped into a light metal, her face taking each contour of the coin. Alice begins to cry again, or maybe she never stopped. She looks back to the postcard, now noticing the city name of Marquette in the right corner, and reads the note out loud: My darling B, another stop, another coin, and another chance to remember the

smooth curve of your cheek, the slow music of your laugh. Don’t spend it too fast —signed with what Alice guessed was a line of xoxo, thumbed away from years of flipping the card over, and over, and back again.

S. Preston Duncan

You Don’t Steal from the Witch’s Garden

This girl had flowers in her arms ink from Araby embraces like curry in a burning room or a spice market on its side.

When she touches you it is the way children splash in aspects of autumn and marigolds always face you somehow.

You can be wiped from the corner of an all-seeing eye.

there is that kind of heat in some hands. there is palo santo and self-immolation and no painting is safe