Once upon a time, a man, feeling hungry, sat at the table and ate cutlets. Beside him sat his wife, rambling on about the cutlets not containing enough pork. Nevertheless he ate, and ate, and ate, and ate, and ate, until he sensed somewhere in the pit of his stomach a morbid heaviness. In that […]
Poetry
THE FIELD by David Hawkins
Into a field of blue vervain & warm sticky stems of wild phlox a couple walks. He carries a bottle of wine, she glasses. They are drunk on the cooling last wisps of sunlight threading through a stand of trees at the field’s edge. She believes the field is temporary, the small task of flowers […]
BLUE by David Hawkins
Man . . . carries the stars in himself . . . —Paracelsus How would we explain it? Would we point to the calyxes of bluets growing wild in the spring ditches, or give the obligatory nod to our catch-pennied history: Boudicca, shoulders stained indigo before marching to Camulodunum— now Colchester—butchering the Roman Ninth? Or […]
OXFORD, MISSISSIPPI; MIDSUMMER by Emily M. Green
1 I get a job at Security Check, answering phones. They give me a cubicle and a headset. The air conditioning makes my leg hair grow faster. 2 I take Spanish translation to fulfill a graduate school language requirement and break up with Eduardo. He offers to look over my assignments anyway. 3 Five nights […]
A RELATIONSHIP, FOR INSTANCE by Emily M. Green
No one you know, but let’s say a woman, pretty. Not beautiful. Her man, also not bad looking, though his age is starting to show. At one time, she remembered to pick him up a sandwich for lunch and he would start her bath when she was on her way home. But at the end, […]
FIRST ATHENIANS by Patrick Fadely
Don’t talk to Christopher Nelms He’s hatching an egg in his mouth And if he speaks He might drop it Or if he didn’t drop it The words might penetrate the egg And the bird emerge all weird With a face in its hand and an eye in its ear. Don’t talk to J. Matherly […]
WINGED-ANTS by Manua Das (translated by Rabindra K. Swain)
For days together our wings keep on sprouting under the ground, in the dark; absolutely light and clear raindrops. One can see through the wings our bodies, dirty and clayish. For days together there is no rain. In scalding heat, in hunger we keep clinging to the earth. Suddenly our wings begin to sprout. Is […]
WHAT MAYBE CAN MEAN by Weston Cutter
She opens the door still buttoning the last buttons of her shirt with one hand, smiles hi and we’ve been this way two times already, now three— we know the chances but haven’t more than kissed, we’re early enough to be both sure and incorrect. Two minutes, she says, fingers up and walking away. She leaves the bathroom […]
A FACT by Laura Carter
Timely the cyclist— the motorcyclist— in pictures and middle voice— an empire of nirvana’s ideology critique…. * Sitting in summer by windows with the fan on, in the year 2000 brand new perceptions are a slow gondola— relatively idle clause, just on the other side of this here. * He throws an onyx, turns on the […]
GUAYAQUIL by Eric Arnold
When we were South Americans We were riding the statue of a horse Elizabeth was Simon Bolivar I was Jose de San Martin And I was listening to Def Leppard on my Walkman The financial district was absorbing all of this Into its dark When we drove to Minnesota Patches of winter rye On the […]
