At the bar they lamented that nobody sits like a lady anymore and grandly wished for the alternative of seeing everything in the world standing up alive, though by their sloshing hearts, knew everything already was and so settled for joining their statesmen in another bout of drinking and screwing: she slaps his face for […]
Contributors 70
Timothy Liu: Elegy For My Mother
A terminal façade verdigrised with disuse—a light mist stippling the puddle skin where pigeons bathe outside the Erie Lackawanna railroad yard as bus brakes squeal to a halt. And the dream derails, a halo of rusted shears circling above those febrile scalps oblivious to diesel exhaust lifting dawn’s gilded skirt, my throat still raw from […]
Nancy Kuhl: The Family Romance
This is where we start: a snowstorm, the memory of a scarf wound tightly, a stumbling trip to the car. A page is devoted to the doorway moment, collision of interior and exterior. Mother slams the door behind her. There will be other natural disasters, a tree splitting broken glass hurricane, an acre-burning fire, some […]
James Hoch: Antarctica
Years later, driving down Hwy 741, fields of white, thickets of fog, my car a mumbled prayer in the gauze, a sleigh, black and Amish, lefts onto the road, its horse harnessed and thudding on, its hooves muffled against the snow. A man staring forward holds the reins steady, steady. I gear down, the engine […]
Kathy Graber: Wildwood in Spring
Late March. I wish it were a better place. Outside the hardware store, we discuss its malaise, kick the curb, as though it were the tire of a used car. The sky’s a thin blue. the color of a small boy’s Easter suit, a dirty cloud patch at the elbow. We’ve got out heads under […]
Stephen Dunn: Poe in Margate
To come back and learn his alcoholism was an illness–Poe had to laugh at that. He knew the vanity of excuses better than anyone, and how good self-destruction feels when one is in the act of it. Still, he thought, you must be sober to write your autobiography, set things straight. He’d give up all […]