His untucked shirt hid his belt missing a loop or two. His morning beer kicked in early. My uncle drove six of us in the back of a station wagon. No seatbelts, confident in the wood-paneling protection, we sloshed atop the vinyl seats, classy as koozies. His mustache and thin lips offered profane prayers as […]
Poetry
Inheritance
Within by
Rush Rankin
To hold magical dominion over another person’s body one need only attain possession of his pared nails or cut-off hair, his spittle or his excrement; even his shadow, his reflection, or his footprints serve the same purpose. —Ernst Cassirer i In epistemology a specific can be tested because various other specifics constitute […]
A House Is a Center Is a Sanctuary Is a Man
by Divya Rajan
Before Karen Brown embarks on a mission, she researches. And so before signing the closing agreement, she made multiple trips, Called her realtor umpteen times, checked the strawberry garden texture In the backyard, tested the soil pH, whether it’d withstand the glorious summer heat beating through the maple leaves. She tasted the mulberries and the […]
Reclining Figures
by Donna Pucciani
Henry Moore (1898-1986) He must have watched women from afar, stretched on blankets in the park, taking the sun on the beach, lounging with coffee and a newspaper, their bodies undulating like the West Riding. They say women adored him— Lauren Bacall, Sophia Loren, his wife Irina, a beauty from Kiev— at garden parties where […]
Re:
by Todd Osborne
Sometimes I believe in something like karma, or not that, exactly, but the idea that if bad occurs to me, I probably deserve it, like the skinned knee I received after a jog—in my apartment complex, looking at my phone, I missed a step I’d walked down a hundred times. Or, the emails from a […]
The Great Frost (After Virginia Woolf’s Orlando)
by Kevin J.B. O’Connor
So the birds turned to stone mid-air and fell on the Earl’s head, is that right? On the oxen’s rumps and the palanquins. Or was it the apparitions hanging in the ice— shagged osiers that struck them dead, a current livid among the roots, transmogrified by the black sun, itself frozen—like a dark cherry, a […]
Empire de la Mort
by Robert Nazarene
for Immanuel: IL MIGLIOR IMPRESARIO DI POMPE FUNEBRI I. THE CRUSH OF THE DEAD Humans are the cruelest mice, breeding memorials out of the dead grass, mixing memory and monstrosity, excavating the last from the first. A man hath no greater love— than gnawing at his own ropes. I glance down from my […]
Why I Don’t Write Haiku
by Pamela Miller
Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood —Daniel Burnham why address the world through the wrong end of a bullhorn? ************************ my poems don’t want to heave one dew-soaked sigh then die like mayflies ************************ want to watch poems climb a half-inch Everest? don’t call me ************************ make no […]
from Anti-Mantra
by Nicholas Manning
When people die they never say: “I should have spent more time with my mechanical topiary replica of the Winged Victory of Samothrace.” Axiology is about attributing value to what is truly valuable, if by “valuable” you mean money and ephemeral social status. I should have spent more time with my kids and my North […]
Japanese Tentacle Erotica
by Stephen Gibson
It’s possible to loathe and desire the same thing. What the heart wants isn’t simple. It’s complex. In graphic novels heroines beg for it to sting. It’s possible to loathe and desire the same thing. In storyboards, tentacles surround their necks. What gender do you think is doing the drawing? It’s possible to loathe and […]
