Hybrid
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Day at the Zoo
by Daniel Webre
On another day at the zoo, not this one, I had the place almost to myself. I even had my own private animal show. On this day, however, things were different. I was hurrying along until I got to the foxes. There was a red fox with a white coat who intrigued me. She was there as before, but on this day I left the fox enclosure to investigate an unfamiliar noise. The caged-in area next door looked similar to the one I’d just left. It took a moment of scanning the interior before I could locate the source of the noise.
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The Green Man of Akron
photo by KJ Hannah Greenberg
by Joseph Phelan
We emerged from the lobby’s glacial climate, man and dog, to stroll along the offramp knolls—
heeding nature’s call. Addled thoughts dissolved into purpling dusk and twenty-one hindleg salutes. Crossing the soft green berm into a maze of silent side streets, we’re drawn like moths toward truculent lighting.Nearly the last night of spring, Ohio air, floral and mossy, alive with possibility and rhyming with the wag of a loping white tail, we follow that persistent snout—confident in its quest for goose droppings in the dark.
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Historical Homes of Currituck County
by Jessica Payne
drawing by Charles Henry Alston, 1935–43
We were discussing countertops when our son began to seize in the backseat. I mistook it for something innocent. He was sleeping…dreaming, perhaps. A small twitch of his left leg, like riding a bicycle. “What is he doing” I said. The car became dark as we drove beneath the overpass, when we exited the other side, he was thrashing. You climbed over the console; you repeated his name. I was confused if I should pull over, as if steering the car put us further from the issue at hand.
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The Elsewhere Oracle
by Michele Battiste
see TOC for art attributions
Green like beginning (leaf primordium)
Green like promise (tangle of snakes)
Green like amulet (scarab’s carapace)
Green like essence (secreted bile)
Green like riddle (hidden katydid)
Green like storm (tornado light)
Green like fortune (emerald vein)
Green like gamble (debtor’s note)
Green like toxin (stem of foxglove)
Green like murk (understory)
Green like monster (from the shoreline)
Green like something soon to come
Oracle
To be superficial is to lack depth, -
Discarded Sermon 9
by Benjamin Bellas
collage by John Bingley Garland, ca. 1850–60
Shhhhhweet sassle-frassle, the good Lord came to me and said, “The only church you need is a freshly sharpened axe and enough breath to reach the forest’s edge.”
2 I bring mine hands and dip them in the marrow of god’s glory, god’s great salivating abundance.
3 I dip mine thighs in spring water, spilled forth from the depths of my mother’s karst body, carried over rock to rock,
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When I reached the rough manner of this rain, the scrunched petals of these flowers, their fraying edges, I stopped and set down language
by Cory Hutchinson-Reuss
photo by Jeylan Jones
O, O, O:Of ode, incantation, pain, ecstasy, or completion. No paraphrase. The body dissolves on the tongue. Done. The river lapped her up. A kind of conversion. Consummation. A communion or an erasure.
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Here, now:
I try to write about time and I write about my grandmother’s body.
