Lebanon, 1978 America, I see through your glass— I reach my hand and my fingerprints are everywhere. Like leaves the gust blows in. I don’t have money to feed your fountains or enough water that it’s never a wish, but America, I can’t stop drinking you in. Your trains, their freight like hours, like the […]
Poetry
My Father Dreams of a New Country
My Father Is the Sea, the Field, the Stone
by Ruth Awad
I don’t know what makes a country a country. If the sea softening an edge of land is enough to say, this is mine and that is yours. There were nights in Tripoli when there was room for us. When the sky pulled up the wings of gulls and we watched their bodies rise from […]
Let me be a lamb in a world that wants my lion
by Ruth Awad
In the beginning, there was an angel with cloven feet who stood by me, and the angel said, My wings are an ocean, and its shoulders split until feathers fell around us. This is how you leave your country. On the back of an ocean. Choked with feathers. _ If someone gives you water, drink. And if […]
Unspoken in an Undated Photograph
by Lee Colin Thomas
Of these five boys in black and white one stands alongside the joke the others make of their cable-knit sweaters and thigh-cut shorts. Some October Saturday, off to scrimmage, they smirk and pose for this photo. Later captioned Sophomore Antics in the campus paper. Did he, the one, find a strange education in his boarding-school […]
Café des Artistes
by Diana Rickard
Reading about Freud and arguing to myself about the origin of you-know-what it felt like I was eating wontons in peanut sauce with a small-boned girl from a broken home. It’s in these lopsided interstices you tend to ingratiate. Across the street windows are like religious emblems, a collection lining the joints, swelling exponentially. Our […]
The Heights
by Robin Reagler
Hoohooooooo a man kneels down before an even more powerful man his hand imagines a cat with lonely fur curtain seltzer weapon lover as the train whistle scratches the face of distances a powerless man lives with phrases stuck in his head the barber’s neck, the barbarian’s necklace and weather frets as it […]
On Plumstead Common
by Bob Petersen
It’s October. Charlton and Chelsea gambol in crisp leaves, one chocolate, the other blond. They don’t care, don’t seem to know, we sometimes call them Vanessa and Duncan, sometimes Thomas and Jane, the pair in Cheyne Walk, not the equally apt Lady and her gamekeeper. They are just dogs, after all, overly friendly, frequently wet; […]
Yearning
by Jennifer Morales
An animal scared silent, rabbit atremble in the morning grass, belly fur slick to the ground, the ground warming to the hands of sun and light. A salt lick, discovered in a day-to-day field, crusted dirt track, sedge and tick bite, blue swallowtail heat. You just must trust it, mouth watering. Cells have no language […]
Crack
by R.B. Mertz
In Homewood you trip on the broken sidewalks i know are there in the mostly white neighborhoods but i notice them less like there is more fresh paint there is more time for landscaping when you don’t spend two hours while the sun comes up on Mother’s Day to stay with Mr. Jeff’s body so […]
The Overture
by J.D. Isip
Straight Guy tells me, “Gay men have it so easy – It’s all just fucking and see you later, pal Am I right?” And I’m of the Larry Kramer school of, “Yeah that’s about right” (and God knows some fag is calling the ACLU right now) He buys us more beer, “I mean, none of this […]
