The day Challenger launched, we watched CNN from the bar at Canaveral Pier. Mist rose from icy water. Tourists sipped Piña Coladas with pineapple and paper flags. Giddy voices chanted time in reverse: Twenty-one seconds till liftoff. Or—Did the announcer say we’re down to twelve? My husband’s lips turned blue in the uncertain morning light. […]
Poetry
Clear Skies, Unseasonably Cold
Sasha Velour as Joan of Arc
by Meg Johnson
Her drawn on eyebrows will stay put with setting powder until the blaze crawls up her body. She had drawn herself with flames at her feet in her sketchbook many times. She first knew danger as a child. She wore it like a stolen dress. Precocious children are often alone. Margaret […]
Instagram Envy
by Meg Johnson
Women with platinum blonde hair, cream colored sweaters, light tan pants, lie on beds with white sheets, no blankets. Brunettes wear thong bikinis, have their nails done, do handstands. The redheads are slim with large breasts. 1 in 4 people are vacationing in Bali. It’s been five years. You overslept again. Style an overhead […]
The Apartment
by Darius Atefat-Peckham
I guess there is ecstasy here. The rhythmic hammers echoing through slick marble and tall ceilings. The song of men thumping their feet all the way up. On the rooftop garden, a fire once blackened and charred. My God, how did they ever get out. If I cup my hands over my ears, curl into […]
Celebration: Norooz
by Darius Atefat-Peckham
What a shitty life. Papa says. And lifts himself, crooked, like the balloons we set free after the celebration. We scrawled messages, crude tattoos on their bodies. Bibi tells me they will reach my mother and brother, orders me to watch carefully else we should lose them in the fog. They don’t visit me in […]
Directions
by Barry Silesky
Outside is the rain half the world waits for as much as we hate it at times; it gives us whatever we can gather from the energy that is frozen and makes up the world I swore I’d never live in. But like everything else it passes on its way to teaching me which way […]
Spring Time Dream
by Barry Silesky
It’s getting worse than I thought it would, as I fade into the old man with the cane and bedroom slippers. This one is stuck in the history he can’t let go, while trying to clear the streets in the city he’s still lost in. I’ve spent my life imagining the next city or the […]
Plumage
by Iain Britton
resting on concrete on a plank of wood an old woman counts herself lucky * absurdities manifest themselves a boy runs naked up the street a heron plucks white feathers from its plumage weather vanes spin erratically * time is a wooden god is the gull shit on its head is lichen creeping time […]
Window Cracked Open
by Steve Coughlin
Thousands of days turning the engine, striking a match, backing the old Mercury out of the driveway. Thousands of errands to the grocery store, the post office, with the window cracked open, heater rattling, winter’s chill rushing in. My mother cradles a cigarette between her fingers, taps ash into the street with her […]
When He
by Remi Recchia
When he takes the other woman to bed, does he think of his wife? Her goodness trailing soot, eyes ringed and fringed in black? She stays up all night, clips coupons from old letters, unlicks the envelopes. They are weathered and damp. A waste of postage. Shoes untie themselves in his absence. […]
