Like the moon outside the window bloated at the belly like a deer she saw once frozen by the creek, crusted with snow, as though it had nothing to do with happiness or death but arterial longing: the children that sprang manifold from the body, sticky with blood, their appearance like a fever breaking, the […]
Contributors 85
Delana Dameron: Weary Kingdom
I want to love this city. I want to love this corner where I hail a cab to ferry me further into Harlem’s belly; this corner where men perch on milk crates, shoot craps, open their dailies; this corner where each morning I pass a coated man who doesn’t recognize my litany of No thank […]
Delana Dameron: Hudson View
I wake to an empty bed, the hair near the nape of my neck cold, damp. I flip the light in the kitchen, jump at the flurry across the floor. Its helplessness: a mouse thrashing nervously in this new world I made for him, trying to find its way back. Up against the wall last […]
Dan Elman: Across Pollination
Who are these foreigners who travel down stairs with their children like sacks of gold potatoes she looks at you as if you’ve squeezed her produce too hard where is it from from what house what kind of land what kind of life does she see you are cross this morning because they’ve cut down […]
Christopher Citro: This Year Will Be Your Last
The traveling fair pulled into town and set up in the flats where the trains used to come through. There’s only a few clapboard shacks down there now. The fair turned them into haunted houses. You can go into Ray’s old mechanic shop, Ray’s House of Doom now, and still see him standing in the […]
Christopher Citro: On Top of an Already Losing Personality
It seemed Leon was finally doing better. That is, until he got that war monument. I don’t know who gave it to him or what they thought they were doing. Did they think it would help him get his feet back on the ground? If so, boy, were they ever off the mark. By itself, […]