but on the bus from Columbia to Ecuador you are unwell yet when an old man hands you a bottle you grip the armrest to lean forward and open it for him.
Issue 92
Rebecca Macijeski: In the Library
I’m building an almanac out of words from magazines. The bits of letters claw through each other Brassiere! Calcium! Triskaidekaphobia! toward each other. Here at the end of a long oak table spotlit by bankers’ lamps, I’m pasting Lemongrass! the words and positioning Poncho! them with tweezers, Loudly! Pawn Shop! sifting through the small oblong […]
Richard Michael Levine: Dinner with Mom
When I asked my father’s business friend On my twentieth birthday to recommend A place in Paris Mom and I could go, He said Panurge’s Sheep “for ze food and show.” The name, I knew from reading Rabelais, Meant to follow blindly, but we went anyway. Displayed on walls and menus was risqué art […]
Lawrence Kaplun: Birthmark
I was my father’s confidante. I was a child so I didn’t understand what he told me. But the goal was just to listen. We shared a birthmark. I have it near my left ear. Sometimes he took me to McDonalds where we shared a plastic booth. I asked, how are you, like a friend. […]
Kyle Hemmings: Edie Sedgwick #14
As a frittering girl with big superficial eyes, I hid under the bed from my father who was now screwing a woman of rock-hard silence. I imagined making love to Bob Dylan but I couldn’t decide whether we made a baby under the bed or on top of it. Maybe we just made time. When […]
Eman Hassan: I’ve Come Back for my Clothes
At Notre Dame Those tattered rags in a glass case belonging to a nameless saint are mine, those cherubs in ceiling corners looking down on us are real. If I stood behind the pulpit and prayed out loud while looking up into the palm of a stained glass dome, whose to […]