You would have thought it was my sister who tried to die— not waking when the blood urine on my legs wet her beauty. Not waking until the nurse’s off the bed, you can stay but no sleeping together. Separating us as though we never floated in the same womb like bright specs from a lighthouse explosion. […]
Poetry
SIX DAYS’ LAMENT by Joe Wilkins
I think I disagree that there is a quantum leap between living and non-living. —George Church, Professor of Genetics, Harvard Medical School So at nineteen he gave his life to God, & now—hands slippery as fish, skin pocked & spotted, beard falling, simply falling from his face— he asks about that girl I knew, the […]
EACH WORD HOLDS THE WORLD by Joe Wilkins
The sky gray as dishrags, she wore anyway cutoffs and a pink bikini top, black mascara, inked snake forever curling up her thigh. As if to gather up some secret sun, she leaned into the fence. Then slipped a menthol between her lips. More than once I’ve seen her leg her way into a rust-bitten […]
THE TELEVISION MAKES ITS PROMISES BETWEEN CHANNELS by Gabriel Welsch
The dark and quiet, short-lived both, each a little hang-up, the line’s tiny death. The light stops just enough to blanket the soup bowl, the afghan’s tatters, the stopped clock, the slide of magazines to the dusty floor. As if the pause whispers departure, the assurance strong as water moving, that it all leaves for […]
LANTERNS by Sanna Stegmaier
The Great Chicago Fire burnt about four square miles, you said and turned your head to the dead factories. A cow tipped over a lantern. I laughed and we stepped on the boat. They took pictures but they couldn’t photograph the heat. I am the bubble of destruction. They call me fairy but I am […]
NEWS AND OTHER NEWS by Corey Mesler
“A single sentence will suffice for modern man: He fornicated and read the papers.” —Albert Camus This morning the news: there are birds in the middle of my best thought. I shake the paper as if it were a tambourine. Someone puts money there. I smile like an all-day fucker. I shake like change. You […]
SURREALIST FILM-MAKING by Aditi Machado
The train is running off track, the air oneiric and chill. We cut across the forest like thieves. All that derails is one thread of your scarf – I am dizzy with its unravelling. How linear it is. Almost absurd, this logic of movement. The train breaks; the trolley man falls back, burns his face […]
21 GREGUERIAS by Daniel Liebert
1. Sunlight – 90 million miles and then through a baby’s ear. 2. Old shoes speak the pungent slang of feet. 3. Musical instruments go blind in pawnshop windows. 4. A coffee ring on a book is the hoof-print of Pegasus. 5. Birds began as secretaries to the dinosaurs. 6. Thrown out unused, the condom will never know what it […]
IN A FIFTH FLOOR MOSCOW WALK-UP, WAITING FOR THE PLUMBER by J. Patrick Lewis
Relentlessly the week-long leak from my sink angers the Grebnikovs below me, Misha coping with joints so painful the concert violinist has forgotten how to saw a bow; Lydia banging on her ceiling/my floor, the broom handle, futile against the drip, but the rat-a-tat-tatting’s a startling imitation of a militia issue Makarov. Moscow never learned […]
LOVERS IN WINTER by Steven Klepetar
You can tell they are saying goodbye that distance has already swallowed them up, by the way they linger on this cold beach, bare feet stung by the rag end of waves. She is weeping and he would if he could. The wind must sound lonely to them and the hungry gulls a provocation about […]
