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Gone Lawn 56
sturgeon moon, 2024

Featured artwork, Untitled, by Abbie Doll

new works

Jeff Friedman


Something Gone

Blue moon, old kisses stale on your lips, the glittery lost shoes and the broken necklace, the crickets calling for you in the tall dry grass, the gold stalks of wheat leaning backward in the wind, blue moon, the voice saying, “Without a dream of your own,” something final in your heart, something gone, a white fire through the trees.



My Father the Leopard

My father was a leopard. He was gone all night and slinked in just before dawn. I imagined him lying on a long tree branch, his yellow eyes drinking in the moon, his spotted tail barely visible as he waited for his prey to come to him. He would sleep all day, and I would walk quietly up to him, breathe his fierce breath and dreams. “Leave him be,” my mother would say. “He needs his rest.” If I touched his arm or shoulder, he’d wake just long enough to swat me across the room with his powerful paw. “He loves you in his way,” my mother told me, “but don’t test him.” Even sleeping, his majestic face was still frightening, and the whole house wasn’t big enough for his angry growl.



Jeff Friedman's tenth collection, Ashes in Paradise, was recently published by Madhat Press. Friedman’s poems, mini tales and translations have appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry, New England Review, Poetry International, Cast-Iron Aeroplanes That Can Actually Fly: Commentaries from 80 American Poets on their Prose Poetry, Flash Fiction Funny, Flash Nonfiction Funny, Fiction International, Plume, 100-Word Story, Cleaver, Dreaming Awake: New Contemporary Prose Poetry from the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom and The New Republic, and Best Microfiction 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024. He has received an NEA Literature Translation Fellowship and numerous other awards and prizes.