When we met, you told me I had a voice that could pinch the corners of our Carolina town wrap its skin into a hand-held bundle and inflate it -- balloon, string-tied braiding infinities around pointer and thumb. You said the only other sound that could do this came from finches when dawn was nothing more than white noise though they moved like the needlework in nests. You were gripping Helium when the ground had been peeled and repurposed acrobatic pictures through a marble …

I put you in this box, like the heart of a bird in my human armpit. Pray every day, face the sun, finger the birch tree I stop at, dogs likely shit on, young people kiss near. Unfamiliar with what you were like at puberty, if you saw the hair come in and kept beat to the steady rhythm, like a chicken’s ascending clucks, or the offbeat clack of clipping nails. So much happens over a toilet. When you fold the paper do you anticipate the wipe or are you able to understand why we’re alive? …

Inpatient Procedure Lord I love to aching all this sweet anonymity, to be a pulse lighting up a picture that is nothing like a face, a list of dosages a clear cup of the correct capsules the right dose of sleep & the right dose of waking, walking, a heart blooded but unburdened of all metaphor for feeling oceaning its waves so cleanly across the screen, I want to slip & sleep under its under, let the body tick off my time & tell each machine I’m fine, I’m …

The children are, at last, asleep. Like bright brass plates we’ve stamped them with new names: Peter, Rachel, Levi, Esther, Aaron, Ruth. Each day’s lesson is how to forget a bend of river, word for willow, your grandmother’s hands. We cut your hair. Release it easily as smoke. I promise sadness doesn’t last if you let it go. Learn this new word heaven, a better life that awaits you it is this one. Jory Mickelson is the author of WILDERNESS//KINGDOM, the inaugural winner of the …

yesterday, grace & i drank white wine in bed. it tasted light, like new friendship. we counted good songs & epiphanies on our fingers but the next morning when i smelt the bed stains, the night was already of the past. my aunt is famous for saying life is a series of souvenirs so pack wisely, but my pockets already feel heavy. i cannot bear leaving anything behind. my memory box is kept at arm’s reach – this note from my best friend in grade six, this my freshman essay on world war …

“The bottom of the sea is less cruel than you’d think,” she tells me, four drinks deep at The Schooner Hannah (the dive bar, not the boat), leaning in to play with the links  of my secondhand crucifix. She’s the great-great-grand daughter of shipwrecked Cape Verdean whalers who didn’t drown, somehow, but instead built, from wet sand,  tidewrack, driftwood & clamshell, houses at the sea’s nadir. They fell for subaquatic fiancées & interbred, she tells me, making a life in which …