One block from the ocean the dog lady catches an unwavering scent & sights the sweet decided switching of a young man bearded & shuttered behind dark glasses What he is hiding from Not his dog who’s hooked to a leash as thin as a filament of duck down The wind is a bitch & …
Category Archives: 2013 Winter
Gingko Song (essay) by Rebecca McClanahan
A one-legged man could make a killing on this street, a left-footed man, anyway, who wears a standard size. He could pluck that suede loafer, the two-tone saddle or dress cordovan right off the sidewalk display here on Tenth Avenue. Something for everyone, in New York City. This young man, for instance, stumbling toward me, …
Sudden Storm (poem) by Nancy Priff
Inspiration rolls across the gulf, a million silent droplets, like a sheet gathered over the waves, its darkness closing in. A giant jag of light cracks the sky, whips the palms into ecstatic dancing. The storm tosses a few droplets like petals, then throws down handfuls, armfuls, skyfuls. Along the shoreline I race to set …
Winter Palace (story) by Rosalie Morales Kearns
Her husband was the center of attention, talking, telling jokes, a tight knot of people gathered round. Lourdes edged past, chose a table at the far end of the reception room. Not much of a view out the windows, but at least a glimpse of water on the horizon, an inlet of the Baltic Sea. …
Par Rum Pum Pum Pum (poem) by Thomas Lynch
the ox knoweth his owner and the ass his master’s crib. Isaiah 1:3 The holy father, in a recent book on the infancy of Jesus, Christ the Lord, debunked the angels we have heard on high and banished beasts from the Nativity. those manger scenes and creches notwithstanding, those figurines of lowly animals, their steamy …
The Air Sculpture (essay) by Thomas E. Kennedy
The structure resembles a cheap imitation of a gaudy Disneyland castle—a gray, mottled, plastic blow-up adolescent dream, and I am standing in its vestibule, alongside Nora, the current fire of my loins, who has accompanied me on the train from Copenhagen to Århus, which is the second largest city in Denmark—in northern Jutland, the peninsula …
The War Was Won with Ice Cream (poem) by Aimée Harris
He was off limits, an American soldier in France. You tell me my grandfather tempted you with a block of tea on a chilly winter day, but what really thawed your heart was ice cream. He’d visit your father’s photo shop in the depths of the Paris Metro, purchasing more film in his limited French …
Dreams of Distant Lives (story) by Lee K. Abbott
The other victim the summer my wife left me was my dreamlife, which, like a mirage, dried up completely the closer we came to the absolute end of us. In the fourteen years we were married, I had been a ferocious dreamer, drawing all I knew or feared or loved about the waking world into …
Sheep Herding (poem) by Madeline Tiger
The moon hung nearly high a perfect brilliant sliver like a rocker not rocking in the greying sky Evening, the Albanians were cooking their sweet mountains in a modest kitchen the tall son’s square shoulders higher than his father’s A clarinet concerto played the long of our walking up and down the quiet neighborhood of …
The Crazy Dog Lady Ponders a Photograph from the Twenties (poem) by Renée Ashley
The crosshatched shadows of balustrades & stairs are a foregrounded snare she could fall into: Kertèsz Monmartre 1927—horizon line one simple concrete ledge & on the skyward side two bug-sized women One is just a head that is making its retreat The other’s striding towards the lens O where are they going with their small …
What Did I Have (essay) by Lynn Kanter
On a recent weekend morning, as I was on my hands and knees scrubbing the bathtub, I felt an unexpected happiness rise up. I was blasting music, and against the yellow tile walls reverberated the bold voice of Eydie Gormé belting “What Did I Have that I Don’t Have.” I had not heard that song …
Quantum (poem) by Anne Harding Woodworth
The smallest book among my miniatures is an unreadable New Testament. 224 pages, 1” by 1½”, and its 3rd dimension— the spine— is 3/8 of an inch. Are there other dimensions? When I hold the book I measure that trinity. Any more than three would be the stuff of flash fiction, like the New Testament …
One Speaks of Loss (poem) by Phillip Sterling
for Maril Would we call what noise the world made before us music? When our father disappears this time the scrap iron near his mother’s barn begins to sing, begins to mouth at least some plaid song of pinesmoke and hardcider, to wrench from our jazz-ache the handsome twist of a sparkplug ratchet, or those …
Theo at 3 (story) by Maureen O'Brien
At three in the morning, Theo longed to hear water running over rocks. He had been on Ward 57 for seven months, but today he was finally getting his legs. As he watched the second hand go around the big clock at the end of his bed, he pressed the button and rose up at …
Tithonus Cries Enough by Nancy Priff
To love you forever, I wanted to live forever—but not like this: a turnip, a cabbage, worse. In this constant twilight, there is less of the meat of me, more of the wink of diodes and the murmur of strangers turning me, muscleless, slack as old rags. Being little more than breath and bone, the …
Book Life (poem) by Aimée Harris
I want to live amongst books with words for neighbors. I want similes to follow me like shadows mimicking my every move. I want onomatopoeia to deliver my mail with a thump against the front stoop of the villanelle that is my villa. Each year will be measured by a chapter. And if one lifetime …
Phony Boys and a Moment of Truth (essay) by Adriana Paramo
I joined the communist party in my early teens. At thirteen, I was a hard-core communist and as any respected leftwing radical would, I carried around three books: The Communist Manifesto, Das Kapital and my all time favorite, Chairman Mao-Tse-Tung’s The Little Red Book, which I never read but was the prettiest shiny little red …
The New Wife (poem) by Madeline Tiger
With her voice of cracked shells, accented, she rushes urgent and medicated on thick pile, barefoot required, from the back room to the front, past glass furniture and teak, past shelving and statues, stereo and etchings, to the telephone; breathless, she’s busy with appointments and diets. She’s been getting degrees, qualms, visitors. She decodes complex …
Stuart Among the Nightingales by Anne Harding Woodworth
based on a newspaper story out of Ohio After the pruners dropped out of the beeches, packed up their ropes, saws, and harnesses into the truck laden with trimmings and logs they drove away. The woman in the house breathed silence at last in the absence of buzz-saw. But Stu, star climber, came back. He …
Outer Reef (story) by Jeff Freiert
North Shore, Oahu Courtney had to admit, grasping the tow rope with both hands, knuckles white on the handle, admiring the foamy white wake of the jet ski in front of him, imagining the size of the swell they were speeding into, the whole thing felt a bit mythic. Here he was being towed by …
The Cellist (poem) by Aimée Harris
Zoe Keating hugs her instrument like she would comfort her child. Her long, thin arms reach around and gently caress the strings. She says this song was written for her boy when four months shy of birth. She calls it Optimist and each note seems a growing wish. I imagine how it must have been …
Perspectives on Space Exploration (essay) by Cory Johnston
It was a stack of old newspapers, but I didn’t read newspapers. They seemed archaic, unnecessary, as useful to me as the box of obsolete electronics with which they shared the back corner of my closet. Of course, it wasn’t my closet anymore. “I knew that you would forget something.” Her voice came from the …
The Furies (poem) by Nancy Priff
You throw off the chains of conscience and call on us to crush your enemies, push them down, or blow them away like the fluffy heads of dandelions. We are the silence of a knife sliding home, the howl of Khan’s horsemen, the whisper of trip wires underfoot, the song of children with backpacks of …
Pantoum in the Margins (poem) by Daniel Patrick Roche
She wants him to be happy she wants him to be happy in his life she wants him to be happy in his life with her. To be happy, she wants him to be sure he wants her—and wants to want her— to be happy in his life. She wants him to be happy when …