May 2013
3 posts
4 tags
Paper Bag Dragon, by Megan Paonessa
He smelled stale. Like––I don’t know what. An old paper bag maybe. Or I could be recalling the lunch sacks he used to hand me, full of odd gifts like a ceramic grinning cat, or a bar of Dove soap. I do remember that the smell of him left a taste stuck in the back of my throat, a chemical taste, like the one you get when you walk by an ethanol plant, and the taste sat there well into the evening,...
5 tags
The Girl with the Missing Face, by Chris Tusa
The bomb had done its job. They said someone had hidden it in a package, and when the paramedics arrived, the girl’s ear was hanging off the side of her cheek. We heard they found her lips tangled in a mess of green shag carpet and had to put them in a bag of ice to keep them alive. While my teacher talked about The American Revolution, I imagined the Ziploc bag filled with ice cubes, fogged up,...
5 tags
Temple and Space, by Ashley Stokes
The thrumming on her hood merged with the clatter of rain on the vehicles’ roofs in what she realized now was a carpark. Her feet felt raw, slashed. Her suede boots had not been made for hiking, let alone sprinting on wet tarmac.
She couldn’t believe she’d remained calm on the hard shoulder, in the squall, with the black moor on one side and on the other hundreds of stranded cars. A crash had...
April 2013
2 posts
6 tags
Drawing Farther, by Róbert Gál
A tautology is a statement that is always even-handed.
The space for our own self-destruction appears boundless, but it’s not.
What is more frequent? Question marks or exclamation marks?
A trap is interesting. It’s beautiful. It’s fragrant.
An internal exile into the external world.
Socially intelligent machines.
A slipping inward.
Knocking on the gate beyond which there are no...
5 tags
The Chinese Girl, by Vladimír Havrilla
I unstuck my upper eyelids from the lower ones and kicked around a bit until the duvet fell on the floor. I had my flute on the side table. Still partly asleep, I opened the case and before I pulled myself together, I played my favorite theme—Ellington’s A Train.
The morning was cool and I quickly pulled on a coarsely-knit sweater and switched on the Sony tape-recorder. My father bought me the...
March 2013
4 posts
4 tags
Preparing to Use a Fork, by Laura Musselman
When I dream of my mother, she is hiding in the farthest corners of dimly lit rooms, bewildered and pale-faced and all bold, brown eyes. This is not unlike the real image she inhabits, sitting in her walker or on a paisley-cushioned bench at the end of the hall as she tries to piece together the portions of my face, my hair, my body into something that falls just short of familiar or safe.
My...
4 tags
Three Poems, by Kathleen Roberts
The Musician
Winter 2010, you crashed the Civic into a semi during a blizzard. I met you that summer. You pulled up, trash bags ruffling in the windows like pennants.
Even walking alone, you always seemed to have sounds about you, as if it was you carrying the whir of traffic or the rustle of leaves, like a halo.
Eventually, I came to think that without you, the world would fall silent.
I am...
4 tags
Tuesday, by Mel Bosworth
I’ve just swallowed a spoonful of warm mashed potato when she slinks into the room. She’s wearing a dress she made herself from paisley curtains. The dress is awful. I ignore her and her dress, focus instead on my Dinner plate. I am easily mesmerized by the greenness of peas. I am easily mesmerized by good china. And she’s nearly through it, too, the kitchen, and on her way to the deadbolt safety...
4 tags
City Girls, by LiAnn Yim
We are all afraid of the man we have read about in the newspaper.
This city, which is all we’ve ever known, is a strange place. Chainsaw attacks in the subway. Acid thrown outside apartments; fires set inside elevators. Cranes topple off half-built buildings. But this is different, this is worse. This is the most terrible story you will ever hear.
Here is what we have learned from the...
February 2013
4 posts
4 tags
Refinance Letter, by Guy Choate
I own a house in Arkansas that I’m trying to refinance, and I’ve been trying for about a whole year now. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to refinance a house when you’re unemployed, and you’ve been unemployed for three straight years, so I’ll just tell that it’s hard. The banks have been under the microscope on home loans, of course, and so they,...
4 tags
So Then Pam Wakes Up and Bobby’s in the Shower,...
A few months ago, I started taping things off TV, just in case I’m ever hit by a bus and both my legs are broken and I need something to do all day. Right now, it’s Dallas. It comes on the rerun channel, two or three episodes a day, so I’m making pretty good progress.
[[MORE]]
Sunday is just thrilled. In college, she would have encouraged this kind of waste, the tapes stacking up in the living...
4 tags
Cody, by Jessica Dur Taylor
If it were any other teenager, I’d just laugh. A black diamond? You must be crazy. But it’s Cody, whose shenanigans I know by heart. Who listens in class, does all the assigned reading. Who still blushes like he did when he was eleven, still thinks his English teacher is cool.
It’s a glorious, frozen wet Wednesday on the mountain, peopled sparse as the desert highway, and...
4 tags
Three Fictions, by Emily Cementina
No Such Thing
Bring me back chapped lips, skin that flakes at your temples, and thighs scooped out on the sides. We will separate the artifacts from your body, lay them on the apartment floor, and take photographs to memorialize the ways you changed.
Reassemble.
I want to smell Mexico in your arm hairs.
I fall in love with your bed sheets while you are away. I kiss the fabric and hope the...
January 2013
4 posts
4 tags
How to Talk to Children About Death, by Andrew Roe
1.
Try to make it sound like you are confident, like you know the answers even though you do not. Realize you will probably not know what to say. You will stumble and fail and get everything wrong and make it more complicated than it has to be and cause greater misunderstandings, both short term and long term. You will say dumb things, very dumb things. But you will have to say...
4 tags
What We’ll Keep, by Brenda Rankin
“There are those who receive as birthright an adequate or at least unquestioned sense of self and those who set out to reinvent themselves, for survival or for satisfaction, and travel far. Some people inherit values and practices as a house they inhabit; some of us have to burn down that house, find our ground, build from scratch, even as a psychological metamorphosis.” —Rebecca Solnit, “The...
4 tags
Hush, by Andrew Stancek
Every toxicology test known to mankind is what Paula underwent. She was healthy, went to the gym, ate well. She could have been on the cover of the What A Healthy Twenty-Five-Year Old Should Look Like magazine. Of course the doctors ordered every test. Their eyes narrow with the certainty that I must know more than I’m telling. They are prepared to buy the undetectable poison from the old...
4 tags
Three Poems, by Simon Perchik
I
Blurred yet something with wings tucked in its eggs and your skin swollen for a single cry
to feed on a morning close by with a warm bowl held out dripping the way flowers
still blossom in pain careful not to leave the ground —it could have been
some hillside, after a long flight carrying your arm as a stronghold for rain not yet dying down
between strangers and shelter —it happened so fast...
December 2012
1 post
4 tags
Two Poems, by Amanda Valdez
Signal Fire
In midday I watched the children play outside my classroom window on the west side of town. I thought how bright the paper is inside with blues and limes and how proud the colors stand within its skin— a pioneer for the small and tender.
With the last of the spiders wiped with pencil textiles I could hear tiny howls, a gathering of five boys throwing around a football, ...
November 2012
4 posts
5 tags
Power Shop, by Pat Rushin
FADE IN:
EXT. SUPERMARKET - DAY
Between the automatic door and an ATM near the entrance, the FREAK, 40s, squats on his skinny haunches, back against the wall. Auschwitz thin with shaved skull, he stares out at the busy parking lot, eyes hollow.
A HORN BLARES and he suddenly stands, lips tight.
A heavy young STOCKGIRL muscles a train of shopping carts to the entrance, breasts straining the buttons...
4 tags
Two Fictions, by James Claffey
The Scrap-iron Man
The silver-black lamppost is safety. As long as you touch its peeling paint the tinkers who come up the road on their donkey and cart can’t take you away. The Old Man says they’re great men for the old trades—silverwork, smelting iron to fix buckets, blacksmithing. Mam complains that they’re only interested in stealing healthy children and making them their...
4 tags
The Birdhouse Builder, by Len Joy
We’re in the seasonal interregnum. The last winter snow hangs on in the shadows of my parents’ two-story colonial, while the first wave of migratory birds circle the neighborhood, checking out the accommodations. Dad wants to reconstruct the birdhouse. The son of a farmer, he can fix broken things. Build stuff. Use tools the right way. I have none of those skills. As a boy I was his unhappy...
4 tags
Ashes, by Kevin Wilson
The day of my tenth high school reunion, a bunch of us decided not to go and instead just bought a keg of beer and sat in Danny Painter’s basement and played darts. We were all still living in Coalfield, and it seemed weird to show up at the high school gym and act like this was some unique experience for us, to be back in town. Besides, the people we wanted to see would not know who we...
October 2012
4 posts
4 tags
Leave Me Now, by Leilani Clark
In 1975, I was two years old. That same year, Columbia Records released Bob Dylan’s 15th album Blood on the Tracks. Written during the disintegration of Dylan’s marriage to Sara Lownds, the album has all the bite, the longing for warmth, and the watery sunshine of an early winter afternoon.
For years, when I heard the first tumbling cascade of guitar notes on “Tangled Up in Blue,” the album’s...
4 tags
Three Poems, by Sarah Bridgins
Graphology
I went through a trunk of your old cards last week in an effort to prod
the open wound of my memory,
my hands like a tongue absently seeking out the raw pulp of a shattered tooth.
Even then, I couldn’t read them, just stare at your handwriting.
I know what they say, the fat, loping
letters suggesting the girlish brightness
of a note from a pen pal, or a childless aunt instead of a...
5 tags
Chance, by Alana Noël Voth
For a while, my son Athen hung out with a girl. They did their homework on the living room floor. Sometimes, they whispered. He was telling her something. I came in the room once, and Athen jumped like I’d interrupted an intimate moment, so I smiled. It was perfectly natural to like a girl.
The girl went home. Now, Athen comes upstairs with a boy, the two of them shoulder-to-shoulder, a smell...
4 tags
And Those Times You’re Better Off Alone, by Ben...
There I was, twenty-seven and already feeling old, walking the streets in the summer swelter. It was the season of denim skirts and Bloody Mary’s. Girls stood in a line on Eighty-sixth Street, waiting for the Hampton Jitney, dressed like it was Derby Day—sandals, sundresses, floppy hats. I had an ATM balance of $117.
The 6 train delivered me to Astor Place, and I walked to St. Marks, where...
September 2012
4 posts
4 tags
Embers, by Sean Conway
It’s the morning-after stink of burnt campfire remains—the damp, black-brittle wood flakes, the white ash—that rattle me the most. The way it gets into your clothes, the way your t-shirt smells in the morning as you climb out of your sleeping bag. The way it settles into your nostrils and won’t leave, embedded in the nose hairs. The way it ruins a perfectly good dewy morning, that hanging stench...
4 tags
Fibroblasts, by Andrew Ladd
It’s just me and my little girl at dinner tonight, my wife at book club, and neither of us has much appetite. No taste for conversation, either: Ellie stares silently at her soup, occasionally bringing a spoonful to her mouth, flinching, and pulling it away again before it’s even past her lips, while I stir shadows in the surface of mine, my tongue pressing against front teeth and my stomach...
4 tags
Broken, by Cezarija Abartis
Esmerelda’s pelvis was broken in five places. She had pulled herself onto the curb and along the sidewalk until her claws were worn down. Eric found her on the corner, after walking around the neighborhood twice with a flashlight. She crawled under a bush, and the bushes and trees were still bare in March. She looked at Eric and didn’t even meow. The vet at the emergency clinic speculated it was a...
4 tags
After the Holocene, by Lauren Carlson
When I was a child, I lay in bed terrified by the sound of screaming cats, their strange duet of hisses and yowls penetrating my sweet-sleeping dreams. I believed the shadows came for me. Called for me with evil yawns outside my window. Too terrified to move, I imagined my covers were magical boundaries. Boundaries keeping the possessed screams of wild monsters out, trapping all good within. Two...
August 2012
5 posts
4 tags
What We Know, by Liz Wyckoff
First, there was pre-adolescence—their evolutionary flux, slow as melting glaciers, from unconsciousness to consciousness. A gradual awakening. Creatures stirring, planets orbiting, oceans deepening, the silent separations of continental drift. The dim perception of transformations occurring on the periphery of their collective awareness.
Then came the sudden stage of epiphanies. Their world...
4 tags
Phoebe, by Helen Vitoria
Phoebe,
Four days before you died they found your junkie sister in her car, roadside and blue lipped in Centralia. Her back seat had become her bed for more than a month.
The three young boys that found her body tried to get in the car, thinking they would get to fondle the breasts of a dead girl. Ani DiFranco blaring on the radio:
teach me to unworry, I will teach you to unhide*
She was downtown,...
4 tags
Driving Lessons, by Angie Chatman
My mother sits in the passenger seat of her Audi, her hands pressed underneath her blue jean covered thighs. I am at the wheel. Mom has on a thick forest green cable knit sweater, which I plan on borrowing because we wear the same size tops. It is autumn, 1977, and I am two months shy of my sixteenth birthday. I had taken a driver’s education class that past summer, but according to Mom, that...
4 tags
Two Poems, by Keith Moul
JOURNAL: RALPH L. MOUL, ELECTRICIAN MATE 2nd CLASS, U.S.S. LEXINGTON 3/3-8/23/1944.
June 19, 1944
“It was a hot day. I mean hot. I was ringing wet from sweat. Now the totals for the day.”
Heat at the Center
Pilots depart, no drill, quickly above rising heat, beyond the heaving prow, the sparkling horizon, leaving sailors to fry above the griddle deck. Air lifts, favoring planes, but gives...
5 tags
from 'Domra, On the Shore of the Ganges,' by Josef...
1. A Swiss writer, who had been living for months in the Hotel Ganges View in Varanasi, recounted that a dead saint was bound to a chair with a hemp rope, weighed down with stones, and sunken in the middle of the Ganges. After a short time his corpse, still tied to the chair, rose to the surface. The dead man’s head sagged over the chair back. A vulture dug its claws into the dead saint’s chest,...
July 2012
4 posts
5 tags
Three Poems, by Sam Rasnake
Lines Torn from a July Morning
… anything but this disappointment.
Words dressing and undressing the tense morning. What if. But then. Why not.
I’d give you Jupiter’s moons if I could. Or a deep summer sky. Maybe the sea at dawn – I know you’d love that.
The cold stream in the woods at Backbone – that would do. Wind filtered by trees. And enough time to climb the stone steps of the damp...
5 tags
Two Poems, by Rich Ives
Witness
Barbed wire hugs the wall behind the young soldier as he plays the cello. How could he have hustled it through the streets, still filled with looters and thieves? A single stalk of corn struggles bravely beside the scarred building, audience to a misplaced world. His cap sits patiently on the stone bench, attentive. Perhaps there it finds something familiar in the music. A...
5 tags
Three Poems, by Gary Percesepe
Gaspar
for kate
The earth groaned and heaved. Shattered sounds of summer storms. North of us, the bark of distant dogs. Trees crashed around us but Gaspar went on speaking. I could no longer help him. He spoke in circles, of the sea giving up its dead and water receding. His voice was liquid and his skin, paper. He was still in his ruined tux. I had chased him this far from the museum. We were...
5 tags
Three Poems, by Jerrold Yam
Acquaintance
Sometimes, when the earth prepares for rain, I think of having a child. Like me it shall not know, gathering life at another’s expense as cloud from lake, how cells become matter, how generously it lowers into being. And on nights when the weight of achievement bears down on its furs and wires, the cord like a ladder tucked away to keep from tripping, it may recognize who ...
June 2012
3 posts
6 tags
September 12th, by Patrick Ross
I spent the 12th of September, in 2001, with the mother of my daughter and son. Our divorce had been final for one year, our physical separation for two. A day earlier, the city of my children’s birth, Washington, D.C., had descended into chaos, a natural reaction to the occurrence of previously unthinkable acts of terror. My ex-wife and son had kept a low profile that morning in the Capitol...
7 tags
The City and Writing, by Tina Uebel
It is twenty after four, in the early part of the summer, and the city is rising. I watch the city rise; the sun lags behind, as it always does—that sluggish thing—as though it needs the city to rouse it. Seen in a global context, my city is small, hardly worth mentioning, so small that you have to be careful not to inhale it inadvertently when drawing the first breath of the morning. 1.8 million...
6 tags
Linus and Lucy, by Ray Shea
I’ll tell you what you see in the video because it’s cute as hell. The boy: eight, blond and shaggy haired, almost swallowed up by an adult-sized sweatshirt; the girl: eleven, black Chuck Taylors, black hoodie, bleached blonde bangs, when they’re not hanging in front of her eyes, tucked behind her ear. They’re decorating the tree, with the Vince Guaraldi Trio’s...
May 2012
5 posts
5 tags
If Not Love, Then the Bomb, by Emily Kiernan
Lucille Fitch, despite a slim frame and a well-bred delicacy, gave birth to five children in her relatively short life. Her first, Peter, died at only a few weeks old of SIDs—or crib-death as it was called at the time—an event which shook her confidence badly, but which the doctors assured her was an unexplainable and unrepeatable as the history of the world itself. Her last child, Michael, was a...
5 tags
Lapels, by Rhys Leyshon Evans
For Luke F.
Winston never used to walk that much, but lately he found himself drawn to ambling around the city every Saturday and Sunday. It was the end of September. The two bedroom apartment Winston shared with an Australian lost in London was an organism that seemed to have regressed in size over the previous six months and forced Winston to locate some form of abstract solace on the city...
5 tags
Snapshot '87, by Sheldon Lee Compton
Huddled up to a split-end oil barrel half loaded with chunks of coal plucked from the belt, its insides on fire, George fought off the urge to take two more pills. Instead, he charged three coal scoops, stood and held two pills for more than two minutes, took a female connector to the mouth of the mines to a man everybody called Torch, loaded the barrel again and felt warm, even when the guts of...
5 tags
Fun and Games, by Sara Lippmann
I’m trying to tell him what it was like.
My brothers played foosball. In my mother’s closet among party dresses suffocating in bags I’d hide while in the basement rods spun and missed. Sometimes I’d carry a jar of olives, but usually I kept my hands free in case the KKK should happen to hop the porch and catch the wink of chrome on our doorpost and torch it all down to reach me.
That’s...
7 tags
from 'The War Beyond,' by Erwin Uhrmann
I
My great-aunt was murdered by a nurse, at some point in the 1980s where there was a hole, a glittering hole brimming with neon light, tragedy, and glamour. And there, in a house with dark drapes, emerald-colored wall fabrics, and sheepskins on smooth parquet floors, is the place where I grew up. Racks of books, where I slid along the top shelf and flew by, pulling them with me, and they came...
April 2012
4 posts
5 tags
Haunt, by Ethel Rohan
Once, Matt and I hitchhiked together from Dublin to Cork. Months earlier, he’d put my engagement ring on layaway and was paying off five pounds every Saturday. Matt and I stood on the side of the road in Chapelizod, our thumbs out, as if waiting for something to be hooked onto us.
“What are we going to do in Cork?” Matt asked.
I didn’t know. Ma always claimed she was...
5 tags
Five Senses: Terracina to Rome, by Eva Sandoval
A crinkled old man working the train station bar: leaf-skin delicate hands, shriveled nicotine-yellow lips, an indifferent shrug—Who knows?—when asked if there’s a transit strike tomorrow. Espresso in a tiny cup, black and spattered with pools of sepia bubbles. Torn plastic train seats, graffiti on the windows: Quanto 6 bella, Riccardo + Valentina, Larvetta Mia! Claudio 6 vecchio. 20/4/09....
5 tags
Bridges, by Walter Bjorkman
Sometimes I want to scratch the skin of a thousand tears off my body and awake in swaddling clothes in your arms. My weeping holds no legacy, no shrift for the poor or helpless, they are only shed for me. We awoke to beastly sounds above Death Valley, got happily lost in the California coast mountains; you gave me refuge years later when my mother died. I could not return it to you in the...
