His hands felt like paws or flippers, big and inarticulate, as if the spaces between shoulder socket and elbow joint and between the finger bones had all fused in the August sun, a kind of annealing, so what had once been uncured now had been except that mobility and utility had been replaced with one […]
Contributors 81
Sean Patrick Hill: The Flaying of Marsyas
This unavoidable pilgrimage is my self-portrait: Wandering through poppies in the Provençal fields, I heard spades sink in gravelly ground, an old woman digging Turf. In the furrows, a flute fallen among sunflowers. I played peasant songs for plates of boiled potatoes To commoners and wanderers in the shadows of a cypress. Night painted no […]
James Cihlar: Mr. Purvis
“You might die writing a five hundred page novel” –Alice Munro What we must know at seventy-eight. The thrill a veteran with leukemia gets when comparing his slutty masseuse Roxanne to Alexander the Great’s wife Roxanne. Earnest Bottoms, a country scholar’s nickname for Ernie Botts, her neuter cousin. Death is on the horizon. We can […]
Hillery Stone: Losing Another
Again they’re taking a tooth, this time a molar at the very back. It’s dead, they say. Rotting the gum right through. It’s all so definite: a sweep of the occlusal surfaces; a hulking metal plate jammed in. This is the way with things gone bad. The root is where the justice is. What is […]
Susanna Rich: Now That We’re Done I Need to Retrieve Something
…no, not the birthday whatever, bagged holiday, or drugstore forgive-me thing; nor the lend/misplace/forget or hand-me-over migrations; nor the fix/yard sale/consign on my behalf I’m missing some feathered part of me that swims starlight waves sage brush, chants summer dreams…just let me breathe what you never- mind: your freezer’s atmosphere, your attic fan’s exhaust, the […]
Laura McCullough: The Ways Water is Used
Her youngest daughter’s thick curly hair should not be washed every night; she knows this, but her daughter begs her to do it, loves the ritual, the smell of the shampoo and cream rinse. It is becoming a chore, the mother thinks, the child getting big enough to do this herself. Her own hair is […]