The origin story is as follows: a fairy and a dragon fall in love, they fuck.Then they separate, each taking half of the eggs that would hatchinto the Vietnamese people, for the princess longed for the mountains,and the dragon longed for the sea. In the version my...
Scene of Achilles tending to Patroclus We are so proud and excited to publish WIDOWS, a new long poem by Tom Sleigh, which appears in full for the first time here at Consequence Forum. At Consequence, our focus is literature and art that examines the culture and...
In the years and months preceding the coronavirus pandemic, David Ferry could often be heard reading from his translation of Virgil’s Aeneid to audiences in and around Boston. Ferry always gave special attention to lines 241-289 of his Book XI, pointing out that this...
—after a photo of mannequins awaiting the 1953 atomic bomb test blast If it weren’t for the monochrome, we would know if her hair is white or blonde. We’re left to speculate. She could be his mother, but her skin tells no stories, smooth as plaster. Sitting beside the...
To create a battlefield, draw a line. then send renewable boys into stitch it down. Band, tourniquet:which half is supposed to die? Blood falling in, the earthonly more dark. Then green, green -as belt, ribbon, scar, strictly held spineaching down the center. Big...
(for Steve Hiatt) Hold sleep, the certain knot of peace,you’ve found her—church supper, in eulogy, changingmoney in the narthex, buoyant, brightly unstringingcarnival tickets from a spool, marking tallies,stamping hands maybe, respectably engagingthe grinners come to...
Already, he has worked like this for hours, moving his scythe beneath the gold horizon. There’s stillness here. There is the swirl of wheat, both what’s been cut and what remains standing, and the blade not so different from a bayonet, a...
On the way home, at Yaqoobi circle we hit that hard right angled turn and got the truck stuck like we have about a thousand other times. That turn always tricks somebody. We were working to clear the wreckwhen Hakmal’s truck behind us was flunghigh, flipped as if by...
Acrostic: Grandmother Mary and the Great War Could this be the river that burned?Under late summer’s waning moonyellow star-points of fireflies flashed onand off in evening’s mists, constellations rearranging themselves throughhaze high above avenue lamps that...
In memoriam: Clementa Pinckney and eight others murdered at Mother Emanuel It’s only here where I’ve seen the surf crimping into ruffled-up petticoats, the edges of olive and indigo skirts of wave, of glance, of flirt, of buff— Rococo cream frame for the rough tide,...
