to the curve of a forearm, posed from a car window, black satin
polish flicking ash Nile queen style.

Remember all the mistakes you wanted to make.

"Chevrolet Tango" by Kurt Olsson, The Unnumbered Anniversaries (Fernwood, 2025)

and Colt 45 sunrises, chicken-fried steak, highways cut clean
through cornflowers, and flooding the engine to catch up

and don’t forget mini-skirts, heat lightning slither of nylon
and strutting like cowboys, tight jeans and tighter pockets
when pockets did work, hands submerged, thumbs and all,
like Dylan’s on the cover of Freewheelin’,

and lighters, monogrammed, glinting
in your hand like fool’s gold, and Diamond matches
and using your thumbnail to flick a light for a friend’s and only
then your cigarette,

and ashtrays the color of bourbon
one could stack as high as a basketball rim, and how
anything handy could be an ashtray—bottle top, soda can,
pant cuff—

emilycarlsonweb.wordpress.com/2026/01/21/m...

At once a philosophical inquiry and an unflinching portrait of a family confronting trauma and its aftermath, this book is an inventive and searing reckoning with the limits of monolithic truth in the stories we tell ourselves—and each other.

– Thomas Page McBee, Amateur

Masterfully weaving narrative and art theory, metaphysics, and memory, Majestic Cut is part-memoir, part-meditation on meaning-making and the slippery nature of time.

Read this wondrous batch of poems, and any such immunity you have will be compelled to disappear.

Jo Angela Edwins, author of A Dangerous Heaven

www.rockwoodpress.com/bookstore/p/...

Cast your eyes across this chapbook, and you will net both small beauties and large lessons about the losses that punctuate the human pursuit of hope and joy. In one of the many stunning poems here, the poet declares, “people are immune to wonderful things.”

In these poems, the past is always “upstream a stretch,” and it will coalesce as a ghost, a cloud, a drawing, a used car, or even because of a pair of knitted gloves.

Jeanne Griggs, author of Postcard Poems and After Kenyon

www.rockwoodpress.com/bookstore/p/...

Absolutely lovely and serene

Solidarity

The cutest!

Agreed - and thank you for saying this