by Edward Dewar

What if I was mistaken?
I always assumed
it was my
Father’s book.
It took years for me

to work my way
far enough
into the room

so that I could open
the night table drawer.

I was sure it held secrets
or at least something
valuable. It joined

their twin
beds together.
It was dark
brown with a grainy

exterior and had
a chunky brass handle.
Initially the drawer stuck

but then it slid open.
Inside was a box
of condoms,
a broken

wristwatch
and Mario Puzo’s
novel with a couple

of dog–eared pages

by Edward Dewar

A little swagger is invaluable.
Improvise, slide
the valentine

under
that wooden
boundary

and she will
do the rest.

She’ll probably toss
a beat–up purple
Frisbee
close
to the fence,

scoop up
the valentine

and tuck it
under the rim.
Then walk right

past her father, like
nothing has happened.

by A.M. Kennedy

I don’t want to fill the plate up with fishbones, I tell Allison at the
feast
She nods and pushes the lemon cake across to me.
I am a gorge, a swell, I am living long enough
to tell you delicate words in the hours of early morning.

The romance is an egg crack —
just gentle enough to splinter the shell,
not so hard you pierce the yolk within.

I love you with the tender of the night, the lutescent dawn.
I am in the graveyard exorcising all the deaths that lived within
me,
and laying them down in the peaceful dirt.

Filthy sweet, I don’t want it to make sense,
all I need it to be is this, yellow icing and batter,
dripping down my hands, something that doesn’t
hurt when I swallow.

by A.M. Kennedy

In the summer we sit and drink hot tea, run the fortune leaves
around the bottom of the cup, rinse the unlucky.
In the garden at sunrise we sit, effervescent
like sticky–sweet honeybees.

You don’t have to read to know how to press bluebells between
the pages of brittle paper bibles until they bleed
indigo and aromatic, flat but everlasting.

They tell you first that no one wants a thing with sting and no
flower,
so they teach nail filing on the chalkboard by practicing cursive,
how to flow like a river, how to bend like a stem to sunlight.

By afternoon some of the girls do grow cymbal forearms,
ambition like a storm head, a lava slick of sour, they run afoul
unapologetically with flinty smiles and overly sharp teeth.

But by June or July, they’re taken to learn how to
make a honeymoon so sweltering the night sky wanes in salt,
how to part thighs like earth blooms and new growth.

A mother holds tea parties with a bowl of poisoned sugar,
we sit in a crescent with our wounds all exposed and have
another.
When we hit the fall, it’s a slow and thick descend across the
sheets,

sticky, but bitter as the Sungkai.