You call from the city of your passing, the city of our birth, with news of common souls. Sending gifts I never dare to open. My hand me-down sister who lived for only a month, just enough time to make a woman. Favoring our mother the way I wear our father’s genes. You […]
Issue 103
Emily Butler: Object permanence
These new phones are slim, breakable. Smooth as still water. I crave plastic on plastic, wrapping stiff cord around my finger like a curl of hair, flirtatiously, though I felt invisible back then on my parents’ porch steps, as far as the cord would take me. These days I could use something to clutch, something […]
Emily Butler: Christening
On the day of my brother’s christening there was a fire at the horse barn down the street. In the box of photographs, among images of my parents smiling in wide-rimmed glasses, holding the mass of my brother shrouded in white, there is a photograph of a horse, running against a backdrop of flames. […]
Wayne Koestenbaum
Wayne Koestenbaum is a poet, critic, novelist, artist, filmmaker, performer—has published 22 books, including The Cheerful Scapegoat, Figure It Out, Camp Marmalade, My 1980s & Other Essays, The Anatomy of Harpo Marx, Humiliation, Hotel Theory, Circus, Andy Warhol, Jackie Under My Skin, and The Queen’s Throat (nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award). His […]
Emily Franklin
Emily Franklin’s work has been published in The New York Times, The London Sunday Times, Guernica, The Cincinnati Review, New Ohio Review, JAMA, Alaska Quarterly Review, Blackbird, The Rumpus, and Sixth Finch among other places as well as featured on National Public Radio, and named notable by the Association of Jewish Libraries. Her debut poetry […]