Black Mountain Blog

You Through the Portal, by Viviane Vives

Posted on October 22, 2019

You through the portal You, sleepy You have forgotten You with the drugs You with the motorbikes You with the rough chicks You almost throw up You stretch over the leather You close your eyes Your throw your face at me Your eyes closed Your mind gone so I can I drink from you.   […]

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Mad Birds, by Viviane Vives

Posted on October 22, 2019

Lake Travis, Spicewood, Texas. December 6, 2015   Do not go to the edge, stay with me, I will bring you the light of my years spent in high heels, then motorcycle boots, I will pluck the memories out of the notebooks I fished out the trash. I will take away the grief, I swear […]

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When We Swam Together, by Adrienne Asher

Posted on October 16, 2019

No oyster knives lie on my table, prying open what was closed; no sea salt, to be rubbed in wounds. Far from the sea, I strain to hear the cries of gulls.   Once, we inhabited the sound of waves. Our minds held bowls of pearls, iridescent, overflowing. We spoke in parables of water, let […]

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Solicitation, by Adrienne Asher

Posted on October 16, 2019

Come now. Pull me into you as wind lures leaves into a vortex, reeling. My skin remembers   fingers trailing and the touch of someone’s tongue. If you push your breath across my wrists, I’ll feel   your most sacrificial secrets brush me. Betrayal and devotion, both. I will allow your breathing message   to […]

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Aftermath, by Lynne Schmidt

Posted on October 10, 2019

So then there’s this– .              The moment after the storm .              where you uncover your eyes, .              and you survived but .              everything else is rubble.   Your fingertips dig into […]

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Batter Up, by Lynne Schmidt

Posted on October 10, 2019

I have been in love a handful of times. But that handful was full of headlight glass after a car accident. A broken mirror dangling off the side, and something so molded it turned liquid and slipped through my fingers.   I loved ferociously, the way a lion takes down its prey. Or rather the […]

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Four to Six Inches, Reading, Massachusetts, by Kasandra Larsen

Posted on October 9, 2019

She wants me to see the snow on the trees, the branches specifically before it blows to the ground or melts, leaving spider arms to wave and dangle their remaining treasures, crisped to endless trembles. I’ve seen snow   of course, before. Trees but not these trees, not adorned with these satin gloves, this hint […]

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Call me Tess, by Susan Azar Porterfield

Posted on October 8, 2019

Not to see a scimitar in a swallow’s wing or a swallow’s wing in an eyebrow’s arch.   Hand maidens strung up like game on a line, like game on a line. Small birds   broken like the necks of girls. Look. It will tell you what you tell yourself   is there. Out at […]

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After Chicken and Rice for Dinner, by Susan Azar Porterfield

Posted on October 8, 2019

Even so, I’m homesick for the stranger,   don’t think unborn child or younger self, not death.   nothing that can be named, though I’d like   to believe something would be there,   a light, a gesture, the moment I passed it by.

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To Late Night Apprehensions, by Savannah Sloane

Posted on October 2, 2019

swallowing smoke through the whistle ruins uncaged bird skeletons catch fire furnace bones a memorial of cologne stench dissolving hospitality taking flight with phantom wings that you dreamed up, but forgot the check on. iron alignment aching for a shift pianos keys’ mouths sewn shut only threaded murmurs that no one can piece together cello […]

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