At the end of March, Alva Burkowitz’s place on Bunker Hill burned down and took seven girls with it. Once, many years ago, it had been a mansion – a wedding gift built for a teenage railroad bride, perched at the summit of Olive Street with a view of the funicular, the dinner clubs, and the night-owl playboys who wore their hair as sculpted and oil-black as the shells of their imported cars. When the heiress died and the Depression hit, the place became a flophouse for starlets and runaways, young girls dream-drugged and far from home. A house of tepid baths and sandy sheets. Gray patties of chewing gum trampled into the carpet. A ...

Kiley was just a few months old when I started reading Superstrings: A Theory of Everything? aloud to her. “What we perceive as a point in three-dimensional space,” I cooed, “is actually a bundle of extra dimensions curled up on themselves. If these extra dimensions were curled up into little circles and were small enough, we would not, based on casual inspection, know they even existed!” The book was a demanding read. It educed the same confusion A Wrinkle In Time had many years earlier, when Mrs Whatsit announced that, by the way, there was such thing as a tesseract. “You see,” Mrs Whatsit had said, “If a very small insect were to move from the section of ...

The plastic Virgin Mary stood on the side of the road, praying in her faded blue cloak. Her hairline was cracked from when my sister Lorraine kicked her on a dare; her palms stained from when I colored them with red magic-marker stigmata. Above her, barbed wire stapled into two by fours held together the welcome sign: Adena. The Town Too Tough To Die. Excavators strip-mined the surrounding hillsides. Bulldozers pushed aside broken timber. Rigs drilled holes through boulders, which miners filled with nitrogen fertilizer and then detonated. Acid and silt leaked into the creeks. Sometimes people’s front yards caught on fire. Coal combusting flammable gasses, gasoline rainbows stretching into the sky. A light coat of ash settled over Adena’s 585 people, ...

This is a piece of a larger project David will be working on as this summer's Writer-in-Residence. When Dad was a teenager, he and his buddies used to beat the crap out of each other every weekend inside a makeshift boxing ring in the basement of his boyhood home. Using his mother’s ball of clothesline, Dad roped off a square section of the cracked and uneven concrete floor. He put old wooden folding chairs in two of the four corners, drew a big X in the middle of the square with white chalk, and laced-up a pair of black leather boxing gloves. Three neighborhood buddies would take turns pummeling each other until their bare-chested bodies glistened with sweat. There was rarely ...

My father was a music man. Not because he could play an instrument with virtuosity, but because he simply loved music. He found pure joy in the sounds. Delight would spring from him when he heard his favorites. It was not the kind of pleasure a man experiences when he listens to an opera and permits a soaring aria to bring him to tears, and it was not the thrill a skilled pianist might experience when he strikes the notes in the tender melody of a Beethoven piano sonata. For Dad, the emotions came less from the heart of a cultured man and more from the gut of a workingman. He’d cry when he’d hear the heartbreaking melody of a ...

1. It was the boy’s first time inside and he thought it was a joke. There were televisions in the pads and hot showers and some mug served you a plate of food in the evening which was more than he got at home. I don’t see what you pussies have to moan about, he said. The next day they burnt out his cell. The boy had a habit of making people jumpy. His face was pale, narrow so that you felt like you only saw one side at a time. He couldn’t stay still. He twitched, tapped his foot, drum rolled his index fingers. The officers saw it and wanted him off their wing. That one’s a walking ...

I wish tonight with the moon low in the sky, I could combust and burst into a shower of new stars. I’m as blown and vanishable as stardust in the pure blue void, cold and limitless. I go to bed now to join nightmare to dream with all my prayer and hoping. If only I coughed light and sneezed songbirds and the pounding hearts of deer so I could free them, if only my empty belly wasn’t the universe contracting and feeding on itself.... Shouldn’t love be self-nourishing; who am I to question the plan and fight the ways of man? Man’s plan is greed and sloth of spirit hidden behind politics and artifice. Masks ...

Podcasts of Caitlin Doyle reading and discussing her poetry During her time as the Writer-In-Residence at St. Albans School, Caitlin was interviewed by Tom Dews for the Ellison Library Podcast Series. To hear the interview and listen to Caitlin read some poems, click here: http://vimeo.com/16853518 Caitlin was a featured reader for the Apostrophe Cast Reading Series. To listen to Caitlin read several poems, click here: http://apostrophecast.com/labels/poetry.html Some of Caitlin’s work available online: Click here to read Caitlin’s “Backward Sonnet for a Forward Thinker,” which was originally published in Rattle: http://rattle.com/blog/2010/06/backward-sonnet-thinker-caitlin-doyle/ Click here to check out an interview with Caitlin and read her poem “If Siegfried And Roy Had Never Met,” which was originally published in Black Warrior Review http://www.apostrophecast.com/blog/?p=303 Click here to read three of Caitlin’s ...

This pdf is an excerpt from the first act of Mona Washington's play, Mason Jar©

eve/ in exile the garden was rented: in other words, it did not know how to mourn & would change instead. the trees yes the trees would go on breathing, the poison oak would choke the telephone poles, immense white roses festooning the airstream in slaphappy wreathes, the sun slowly unwrapping the white of the verandah wicker, like bandages. everything: flimsy lids & thin folds/ everything: gone amorously to seed: good soil, sprout here. in the mesh & vagrant shade of sunfat firs, sweet death of leafmold & mackintosh & the last stubborn floorboards ript, uninhibited from temporality & man's passion for nomenclature. just listen: I was there, I remember birdsong & the sun breaking, many-fingered in the firs. god ...