“For the parents in Naariya [of Baghdad], the clocks are frozen at a quarter after ten.” —The New York Times For a chance to move on, for a shot at the win, the answer is usually C. Which household item will stop in its tracks the moment the bomb detonates? The answer, they think, is […]
Poetry
AGNOSTIC HEARS ‘THE LORD’S PRAYER’ IN LATIN by Heather Kirn
Father, no sir. Your keys are in Cali, sunk to the sediment of no man’s tomb. Vent a pregnant tune. Feed polenta to a sick kid in Cairo from your tiara. Pan him, know him, quote giddy anthems that no business holds dear. And diminish no busy Lolita, no sir; stick it to no timid […]
CUTTING DOWN THE PROPERTY LINE by Sean Karns
1. Tire Swing He hacks at the thicket, grabs hold of the blackberry canes, bloodies his hands; blackens them with juices. He looks at his hands, sees labor: a future in tearing down. There are children swinging on a swinging tire. He wants to join them. He feels a stare; his father sits on the […]
CHE GUEVARA’S FINGERS by Kathleen Hellen
He knew about the CIA. About Bolivia. Her Coke was sweating. She’d seen the movie. The T-shirts of Guevara in that iconic black beret in the days before the army had him cornered. They gave him up for maize, he says. Laughs. Sizes-up the guests at nearby tables. How had they connected on the Internet? What whispers […]
THE LOVE SONG OF T. S. ELIOT by John Guzlowski
His new false teeth made it hard For him to speak the French He wanted to whisper to her, Those lines from Baudelaire, That always touched him so, Lines about the light love creates, So Eliot took the teeth out And gummed his Baudelaire Until she begged him to stop, Her tears rolling through Her […]
HIS BROTHER HAD SHOT THE BOAT-TAILED BIRD by Maggie Glover
So he took the pellet gun from his hands, nudged the grackle’s beak with the butt of it. The noise from her mouth, like Catch me, Catch me. He lowered himself to his knees (that summer, he had grown five inches) to slam the gun into her blue/black head. Then a loop of blood at […]
THE BOYS WHO LEARNED TO FUCK FROM PORN MOVIES VERSUS THE BOYS WHO LEARNED TO FUCK FROM THEIR FATHERS by Maggie Glover
One side offered, believe or not: daisies. Their orange bowties and Monroe piercings made a hundred cities in the grass. The other side: the knowledge of grasshoppers, how to jump rope—they wore sneakers that looked like sneakers, slogan pins like Shy in the Tooth. The battle raged. After careful thought, I arranged for both teams to […]
BOLT ACTION: A LESSON IN DIFFICULT SUBJECTS by Maggie Glover
The first time I shot your rifle, its recoil marked my chest— not in watercolors as your thumbprints on my waist— but in broken-vessel black, purple angering the wound-edges while you taught me to decrease the impact, pushing the butt into my shoulder. A friend once wrote: a gun gives everyone potential (whether shooter or shot […]
THE IMPOSTER by Mark DeCarteret
will stop at nothing, singling out his thinnest of existences as if it sifted out the depths of his dreams— what’s authentic never netted, caught-onto, stepping out onto sets, so unfit and oft petrified (where the past awaits like a walk-on on strike) dressed in less and less, at best a towel or pelt— selves […]
TO A LITTLE WHITE MOUSE by Yu-Han Chao
O The first thing I saw was you. Perfect, white, albino cherry you. A white furball, the kind with plastic eyeballs that roll and feet that stick. Innocent, fuzzy, shivering in your white ball. Ψ Then I saw a snake in the same cage as you. Forked tongue, the devil’s pike. Scales, gleaming eyes. Long, […]
