The retarded boy leered at us all summer from his tricycle. He wouldn’t leave us alone. We feared him for this persistence and for his soft gray teeth; we loved him for the smell he carried of summer rain. As soon as we saw him, leaves of rain seemed to spatter the ground. Their underside […]
Issue 79
Noel Sikorski: Eczema
The allergies have taken my older brother’s body. At 5’11, Chris is a hundred and thirty pounds of inflamed epidermis. Everyday, for months, he scratches until blood and skin pucker into hard helmets of scabs, crafted to be pulled off. Culpability, here, is obvious. The specialist warns us to watch his diet and gives a […]
Sam Ruddick: Details I
I want a woman who broods, Throws things, cries black eyeliner. The biggest eyes you’ve ever seen, She’s anorexic, in a coffee shop. She hates me, She yells and hits When she gets fired Or someone she doesn’t know dies And she wants to pretend It’s important.
Ghita Orth: Roman Busts
Aging ourselves, we’d come to check out ruins, not these heavy-breasted women preening their slow pasaggios past our table at the Gran Caffe. Rome is about decrepitude and ancients – all that grey fractured marble, those pocked ranks of sculpted heads, might prove across accumulating years old isn’t all that bad. But now this affront […]
Delisa Mulkey: The Hitchhiker
My first one had a dog with him. I was 16 and he caught me staring at the naked girl tattooed on his arm: he laughed rough, like whiskers, and full of phlegm. He smelled like a dog in summer looking for meat, ready to mate. He said something cool like It’s hotter’n a gator’s […]
Rocco Lungarellio: Everything is Roundness
morning A woman’s advice is an oval earring- a round Larimar stone named after the sea. It is a balled- up crumpled napkin of wrinkles on your mother’s face as she hands you two white aspirin for a fever. afternoon Any walk back from the places you go with your father when there aren’t many […]