In the bed she assigned to me, too narrow for tonight, taking for her own the couch on which I could just as easily stretch with a three-inch shortening of my straight and narrowed spine; the heat blowing its desert over us all night, competing all night for what little air, I turn as she […]
Issue 76
Richard Carr: Immovable Sleep
My neighbor walks his dog, a decrepit Scottish terrier, in the alley, very slowly, like he’s pushing a wheelchair. Only in his middle years, the man has enough dreary vitality only for this, for walking the dog. He loves only the dog. All else is lethargy. Behind our apartment building the dumpsters are always overfilled […]
Andrew McCarron: How Sunflowers Come
I watch as an ozone-gray cloud passes over John Hardeman’s easternmost meadow off Route 199 in Red Hook. The month is April and the Dutchess County sun comes and widens over soon-to-be swaths of purple loosestrife. In a dream last night the Dutchess sun boomed and in one heave it was June and June pulled […]
Roy Seeger: Hogan’s Heroes: Sgt. Shultz, Unsure of what He Knows, Considers His Work
I’ve never seen the people I work for but maybe it’s a mistake to think they’re like me. I’ve talked to everyone moving through this Stalag- prisoners, guards, locals- and their stories are mostly the same: Boy finds girl, boy loses girl to the war and so on. It’s heartbreaking really, how each story can’t […]
Gary Hawkins: Happy Days
We had completed all the usual deportment Conducted breakfast over silence and glances Shared our bed and kissed with out-turned faces Packed your clothes in the trunk without argument Now the wind picks up chasing birds across the lake We hurry the last boxes inside your new place We wait on a small porch as […]
Noel Sikorski: Fuck
The first time I swore was on the swings in Pusan, maybe I was six. I remember because my mother caught me as I sliced the air singing fuck and shit and asshole, my feet pumping harder than my heart. But I can’t remember how I learned to cuss, as my classmates enunciated it. Children […]