I see you gracefully swimming with the country club women

It Can't Be True
-- by Michael Brownstein, author of the must-read World on Fire

That we belong to one of the last generations
To See an uncontaminated sky
And walk through enough forest
Stretching for hundreds of square miles
Uncharted and completely surrounded by itself
Holding us because being there
Is a real surprise, vast and everyday
And not just the unspoiled tip
Of an island fenced off by the gov't.
For one brief clumsy weekend
Fucking away from the glare of the city's
Shiny hallucination

On Opening a Book of Photographs
-- by Kim Addonizio

I look at them until I feel immune,
a pile of bodies photographed by Lee
Miller, nineteen forty-five, their strewn
limbs, at first random, like spokes, ray out
across the page. That checkered rag -- a dress,
maybe, or only a piece of cloth -- I doubt
it covers a women. The others' sex
is easy: they're men; their faces, and
two exposed penises, nested in the shadowed
groins, look tender, peaceful, like that hand
curled on a chest, as if it knows
where it rests. But it doesn't. However I
tell this, they're not redeemed. There they lie.

Real Life
-- by Kim Addonizio

Here we walk without wallets,
no keys to anything. The gates
swing open, we move among the
cows, hot hills, at night through wet
foxtails; the kitchen light hums
winged things circle it. Yesterday
you slit a snakeskin and found
the diamond pattern interrupted,
in the center, by a heart:
covered it in salt, tacked
it to a board for drying out.
This evening it's soft, the scale
you peel for me a tiny
translucency in my hand.