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…
This story was nominated for The Best of the Net. The boy and the girl were watching the father working in the backyard. It was Saturday afternoon and the sky was gray in a way that seemed like Saturday afternoon was always going to be gray from here on out. The girl was to go […]
So the birds turned to stone mid-air and fell on the Earl’s head, is that right? On the oxen’s rumps and the palanquins. Or was it the apparitions hanging in the ice— shagged osiers that struck them dead, a current livid among the roots, transmogrified by the black sun, itself frozen—like a dark cherry, a […]
without burning when everything is heat & sex and can & can’t and Yes & yes cool breath that draws beads of cicada-drenched humidity from where they suffocate your neck can’t be transmitted by nerves called love without getting caught in reflex loops of fuck & fuck eventually we wake to no whether in illness […]
