Contributed By: Nick Conrad
Metered sunshine. Wind rationed, and rain.
A heaven for incrementalists,
with chaos always just around the corner.
Is it any wonder that he had grown
too fond of night, of the ruined castles
that lined the Rhine. What was there
to do, now that the moon no longer
drifted toward fullness, that tonight,
orange sail unfurled, it plows
through a bank of clouds. There is that,
he thought, that thin peach slice
leaning against a ripe gooseberry.
Return to table of contents for Issue 12 Winter 2018.
Sometimes I believe in something like karma, or not that, exactly, but the idea that if bad occurs to me, I probably deserve it, like the skinned knee I received after a jog—in my apartment…
You lie awake, tired and lonesome underneath a horrifyingly new patchwork blanket of your dead grandfather's old clothing. The boy dropped you off thirty minutes ago, and you walked the half mile up your secluded…
Issue 12 Winter 2018 RUTH AWAD is an award-winning Lebanese-American poet whose debut poetry collection, Set to Music a Wildfire, won the 2016 Michael Waters Poetry Prize from Southern Indiana Review Press. She is the recipient of…
When I close my eyes I see the child in me hug the hour hand licked by the flame of memory emerging in stark darkness a faint light filters through cracks a half-open door…
ISTANBUL, 2014 The days of the Pudding Shop are over. In the sixties and seventies it was the way station of hippie dreamers, whose eyes and hearts looked East. It was the start of the trip, the end of the trip, a place to exchange energy. The restaurant is still there, at the bend of […]
Image courtesy Kelly Sikkema The scrap yard at the north end of my long city street hummed like a dystopic anthill, the day I drove up in my 15-year-old compact car, parked in front of a heap of flattened wrecks winking in an oily sun, got out, and made my way to a busy […]
On his motorcycle, far from the Prague of his birth, Mateo knows strength comes from speed. To be one with the machine, in a straight line, even in bends. Aerodynamic device, body at the service of wind. Only a calculation error, the wrong acceleration in a blowout, leads to collision. After the crash, he stands […]
