I first noticed the wolf in East Africa. Heard of brothers fighting and killing each other outside Makamba, daughters poisoning fathers in Goma, laughing while their houses burned, and everywhere the ritual of suffering enacted with a kind of desperate abandon. So I knew it had come around to this once again: an axe age, […]
Fiction
Jill Birdsall: Oker’s Pond
At age thirty, Isaac Eldredge sailed south to find treasure in the Carolinas. His parents sent him for seeds to plant up north. It was the first and only time he’d left home. He visited merchants and shop owners. He bought rugs and vases and lamps. Then he found Dolly on her father’s farm. He […]
Jennifer Swender: Jump
That she does not jump in means she jumps in many times. True, these jumps are in her head and therefore not real, but that doesn’t make them feel less. There is the one where she underestimates the edge of the rocks, lands stiff-legged like a doll in unexpectedly shallow water and timbers into the […]
Niels Lyngso: XXXV
And I think of my old life One after one all the life before the era of us the grinding voices fall silent it seems so foreign and finally I am familiar so close and remote master of my own house here where like the house across the street no one is home empty and […]
Niels Lyngso: XXVI
you are red I am blue It is an electro- magnetic field one cannot see it but one can feel it There are zones of invisible foam rubber balls stand-offishness and zones of unmanageable elastics inevitable attraction I get dizzy the doctor’s nail is jaundiced as now a neck a knee place and time a […]
Niels Lyngso: XLI
Sleepless a cloud of mosquitoes Pieces of man stem lifts from the lake’s mirror polished floor with filtered branch work rises among black branches is fallen and now lies crosses out through the forest out over the earth with roots hunts through the land hovering high in the air in shifting formations yet stuck into […]