Call the ringers of bells and builders of forts, wincers, pincers, lobsters and shells, oysters, roisters, needles and threads. Let ducks dawdle on the dock at the Wilson Pond. You are back where you started from, new, refreshed, ready for the romp— hey—you’re all honey-bee buzzing out of every meadow in New York State. The […]
Poetry
The Men Who Grow from Curbs by Lauren Schmidt
We’re made of beer cans and cardboard. We crease in November wind. Our blood streams in the whiz of cars. We groan like engines, wear mismatched boots. Our eyes are gears that crank a screen of all the lives we’ll never live to see. Our skin is yesterday’s New York Times. Our spines are made of […]
Gridlock by Lauren Schmidt
A teenage girl in too-high heels stamps past a line of cars. Held by a stop sign, drivers wait for her patent leather daggers to pass. Her stagger begins to slow: she knows they cannot go until she’s gone. She idles in the crosswalk, stages herself before the cars in a half-deserted plea to be […]
Elimination Half Life by Lauren Schmidt
Four things. All a body wants. Four things. Food. Drink. Sex. Sleep. In no particular order, seemingly all at once. A circuit of strings pulls in and out over the body’s systematic wheel, tugs up buckets from the well of when and what the body wants: the sweet glaze of butter on […]
Clean Hands by William B. Robison
Cup your hands over your face, breathe deeply you can smell upon your fingers and palms the history of the day and maybe even the evening before—a pungent olfactory document recorded in sweat, musk, coffee, dirt, grease cheeseburgers till the hand soap vandals come marauding gothic goop-mongers eradicating the evidence of another epoch tuck your […]
Who’s Driving by Liz Robbins
decides the fate of every love story, even when a cloth is sodden with wetness. He and she ride to town on a noon bus, she, sitting on his handkerchief. They have been sent for groceries, he, one week new, friend to her father, under him at the Consulate. Packed in with peeling leather bags, […]
Untitled #2 by Aleksey Porvin (translated by Peter Golub)
A childhood memory of a summer day engraves the cough drop with untired saliva, and brings out a phrase, sweetly puckering the mouth— if it sounds, hear not a question, but an encompassing intrigue: what is this lachrymose animal who lives under the creak of the swing? Who—without fear—taught this creature, which uses silence to rub […]
Untitled #1 by Aleksey Porvin (translated by Peter Golub)
The boxy tube of knocking wheels is squeezed by the speed and leaks a long odorous drop of train— glues the clatter onto the horizon; why the craftwork, is there not enough construction visible? For instance: the flat fog, tied by the powerlines to the forest posts or the anticipating – that railroad pointer directing […]
Katherine: Opening Argument by Mark Neely
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, desire is a furious splendor worth a hundred men, exuberant or staid, bearded or shaven, it doesn’t matter—they’re all beautiful when they’re young and glow like armored coursers. The one felony of passion is to let its luster dull, to drape age around you like a dusty coat and […]
Nymph: Stage I by Christopher Munde
I bought This dress, thinking Finally I’m sure, if not Of who, at least of what I am. I sashayed (sort of) around The boardwalk in it, beside VA beach, And I’m sure you’ve Never seen so many navy boys, Waves of them, blooming Out of the silk-white suits, nearly Blotting out the waves— Now […]
