#weekly apt

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Oft-aloft by Terrell Jamal Terry

"But there’s no code for this code. So don’t count these days down, but recall when you would not take good care of yourself." -- Terrell Jamal Terry, "Oft-aloft"

The table holds a lilac bowl to locate a past buried. Give me the viridian river of warm towels. Crack the bruised wooden chest for clues. Letters leave gifts of entrance: dream compasses in ink carrying weight, uncoiling history, tense by tense—a distant reach. Trace echoes and shadows, step aside from stuck pedestrian stances, and write line after aging line into the dark neck of evenings,…

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I Speak Four Dead Languages by Emily Jaeger

"How comforting—a language whose true speakers have been dead 3,000 years. No chance of speaking wrong or wrongfully." -- Emily Jaeger, "I Speak Four Dead Languages"

[wpaudio url=”http://apt.aforementionedproductions.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/i-speak-four-dead-languages.mp3″ Text=”I Speak Four Dead Languages (read by the author)” dl=”0″]  verter zol men vegn un nit tselyn words should be weighed not counted   Yiddish There were no recipes passed down, no broaches, no candlesticks. No full sentences. Only the phrases my grandmothers would toss back and…

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Excerpt from Gillian Devereux’s “FORECASTING THE FUTURE”

"we are as certain of next Christmas and / the tides and death / as if these things had / already happened"

-- Gillian Devereux

The final excerpt from issue six is from Gillian Devereux’s erasure poem, “FORECASTING THE FUTURE.” You should read it now, and then order the issue to read the rest!

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“A Long Goodbye” by Lydia Armstrong

“It was what I imagined it to be like

when my father said he’d pulled out his own tooth”

-- Lydia Armstrong, “A Long Goodbye”

Check out got the visceral poem we’ve got this week at apt: Lydia Armstrong’s “A Long Goodbye”

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“Run to Seed” by Matthew Poindexter

“The brothers spill out through the back door and I follow, a herd of men shuffling toward the barn, where Ed and Lee will talk about who needs to borrow the Kubota next, and Jeff will again tell me not to fail the family.”

-- Matthew Poindexter, “Run to Seed”

This week’s story at apt, Matthew Poindexter’s “Run to Seed,” covers what we owe to nature and ourselves. Check it out!

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“Lard List Label” by Lindsey Harding

“Inspiring banality reigned. Mothers wondered, Why hadn’t I thought of that? And so they started to think about that. And this. And to make lists of everything they thought about. Then they posted their lists. And organized them on Pinterest. The mobile app Listr listed their visually constructed lists of lists.

In the real world, mothers covered the surfaces of their homes with numbered sequences and catalogs of items and activities. These lists gestured, like pictures, toward a future state in which the past, however tedious, is recorded to be forgotten. The List became the maternal marker, the new way of accounting for a mother’s domestic ability. Mothers were divided not by the Mommy Wars reignited in a Tweet from Hillary Rosen about presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s wife—Working Mothers vs. SAHMs—but between those who could List and those who couldn’t.”

Lindsey Harding, “Lard List Label”

We’ve got a great piece of satire for you, new this week at apt!

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Sputnik Planum by Jamie Shrewsbury

“Your crimson valor is hypnotic. You draw us with your silky surface, your youthful glow. The conjuring of your broken past still leaves you with inadequacy’s dull ache. You do matter, see? You mattered eons ago just as you do every time you make your sedate revolution. Your brief stint as Pluto pariah bruised you, but it could never minimize your allure. You knew that part of your family felt nostalgic, but it didn’t change the cold. Your tears fill mountains and ice over. Has it always been this?”

-- Jamie Shrewsbury, “Sputnik Planum”

We've got a sly epistolary story, written from Pluto's moon to Pluto, courtesy of Jamie Shrewsbury!

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Two poems by Erin McIntosh

“Glass more-than-half empty. Her, playing with a loose fingernail. Me, seductress to none. The day I make the first move is the day I forget who I am and from where I came. This is not a happy thought but a truthful one.”

-- Erin McIntosh, from “Set”

We’ve got two poignant poems from Erin McIntosh, new this week at apt!