I’m masturbating across the hall from her dying. I’ve just finished giving her a bed bath. With that crazy half-detachment required when someone you love has stopped being that person. And has become instead this sickness. A moany dissolving body to be turned and agitated and tended. She can’t take soap or touch. I squeezed water from a soft […]
Nonfiction
We seek personal, critical, and hybrid essays that move, engage, and transport us and our readers. We are sure to respond to many things, but a strong authorial voice, a clear thought or experiential arc grounded in a sense of place, and some connection with a writer’s risk in approaching their story are often most resonant. And while we are open to work of all lengths, we prefer submissions of 5,000 words or less.
Unrequited
The Shalom Sisters
by Deborah La Garbanza
ISTANBUL, 2014 The days of the Pudding Shop are over. In the sixties and seventies it was the way station of hippie dreamers, whose eyes and hearts looked East. It was the start of the trip, the end of the trip, a place to exchange energy. The restaurant is still there, at the bend of […]
Rt now sum1 is writin a Youtube Com3nt
by Tyler Gillespie
He stands at the front of a crowd gathered for a Las Vegas mall’s grand opening. The boy vogues, whips his hands around his face. He strikes a pose. Local news reporters drone on about the mall, but no one pays attention to them. All eyes focus on 15-year-old Brendan Jordan. A few days later, […]
Messages from Howard
by David Eye
Howard followed me out of Stuyvesant Park on a June night in 1995. Inside the park, in the shadows from streetlamps through trees, we had checked each other out, but hadn’t spoken. I turned left out of the tall iron gateway, walking north on Second Avenue, and Howard followed a few paces behind. When he […]
The Blond Sheep
by Merrill Cole
Just having finished the back and biceps workout, I walk into the men’s locker room at Holmes Place on Hermannplatz. When I hear female voices gasping loudly, I leap towards the back and go through the door that leads to the pool and sauna areas. In the hallway in front of the pool, there are […]
From New York City to Mar Chiquita: Evocations of a Singular Friendship
by Consuelo Arias
“Now more than ever, my words conjure your silence” (dedication to John Anthes, from El libro de la muerte) In a text from Invitación al polvo, La nada de nuestros nunca cuerpos, Manuel Ramos Otero writes: “The elderly women of Mondoñedo bring ears of corn to the little Galician girl, over which falangist flies flutter, flies who never […]
Nichts passiert in München (Nothing Happens in Munich)
by Alicia Anderson
I tug my collar higher to shield my cheeks from the wind. Winter days bleed together, muddling over the edges of one to the next. There are flickers of joy, embers banked beyond commute and cubicle. There are days tinged by sorrow. We’re not meant to live in emotional extremes all of the time. Over […]
Cows and Wows: Why India Works Depite Itself and What We Can Learn from Its Example
by David Kirby (photos by Barbara Hamby)
PUT YOUR STAMP ON LILI When Barbara says she wants to go to India, the first thing I say is, “I’m not driving in that cockamamie country.” When it comes to driving in other countries, mine is a checkered history. I still don’t know what the traffic signs mean in France and Italy, and I’ve got […]
A Tour of Ancient Lykia (A Letter Sent to Albert Goldbarth)
by Vincent Czyz
13 September 2006 Dear Albert, A return to the art … or is it merely a craft? Of letter-writing. Certainly different from writing an e-mail, which is generally dashed off in a few minutes—a single sitting at most. But still different from the old days of pen and ink or even of the manual […]
Red Memory
by Christian Sorace
After his collection of over 200 Chairman Mao souvenir buttons was stolen a few weeks prior, on February 25th, 2012, 71 year-old Li Decai used a red belt to hang himself from a beam two meters high in a shed in his bean and carrot field.1 Li Decai became a local celebrity in the county-town […]
