Tentatively taste a once sweet word,
a slipped memory out of your past

Love is one example. But you are hesitant
like deciding to scratch your poison oak

when you know you shouldn’t but do
anyway. Or push your tongue against

an aching tooth to make sure it hurts
enough to need remedy. So loss is another

kind of need I’m thinking. As in a tooth
even a root canal can’t save. Reason

recommends extraction to relieve the pain. Or
prevent more dire complications. But by now

the soft tissues of your racing heart have
become too inflamed with invasive memory

from arcane regions of the brain. Those parts
holding onto tenderness, or mostly regret.

The sensitivity rife with remembering. Drifting
there become disease. Lost stillness swelling

to anesthesia you must reach, if you can. Lack
of sensation into lesser pulse-beats again.

__________________________________

Ed Higgins’ poems and short fiction have appeared in Duck & Herring Co.’s Pocket Field Guide, Monkeybicycle, Pindeldyboz, and Bellowing Ark, as well as the online journals Lily, Cross Connect, Word Riot, The Centrifugal Eye, Mannequin Envy, and Red River Review, among others. He and his wife live on a small farm in Yamhill, OR with a menagerie of animals including a Manx barn cat named Velcro. He teaches writing and literature at George Fox University, south of Portland, OR., USA.

The Past Is Never Dead

It’s been a week since the iPad made its official debut. And while the media is still rather excited, it seems the annoying hoopla is subsiding. That’s right, people are starting to let go. DSM’s month of noir may have ended weeks ago, but that doesn’t mean we’re ready to forget one of our favorite genres: Check out these Los Angeles noir collections, edited by Denise Hamilton. Bookslut discusses Kenzaburo Oe’s The Changeling, Norris Mailer was twenty-six years younger than Norman Mailer when they married, which means her new memoir comes as no surprise. Financial oversight is all the talk these days, but the academic world has needed market oversight for years — just look at the University of Phoenix’s faculty. And finally, get your morning moving with a trip to Havana. Travel writing, the breakfast of champions. – Andrew Geer