When you pick her up at the hospital after work, in the light blue Volkswagen that still shows the phantoms of the wedding graffiti when it rains, you can smell the day’s disinfectant in her green uniform. When you take her head and put your mouth on the skin behind her ear, you can smell […]
Issue 66
Ellen Wehle: Herodias with the Head of St. John the Baptist painting by Francesco del Cairo, 1625
I When no one is looking, she whispers in his ear. Sir, you have spoken against me. It’s beautiful, such precision, such an exact measure of penalty to offense. Her needles piercing the soft meat of his tongue. II Always the artist controls the path our eye will follow. The swooning queen; the hand, upraised […]
Charles Harper Webb: Us and Them
The same old story: We’re the grass, and they’re the feet. We’re hors d’oeuvres, and they are teeth. We stand in a worshipful line outside the Hall as they file past in yellow rain- slickers, giggling like naughty kids. We know our place by how many of them speak to us, how long. We find […]
T.B. Rudy: Bridges
For every bridge that’s marked with paint, scribbled messages proving love with algebraic signs and aerosol devotions of forever, there’s a boy who’s waited up all night to sneak out, alone, cargo pockets rattling with pressure, a navy jogging hood pulled over eyes that never glance at headlights flying below, his teenage bicep flexing, arm […]
Jessy Randall: Three Martians Learn to Make Marshmallows
“I have been reading too much science fiction,” he sighed. Giant feelers grew out of his penis. “I hate it when there is no dialogue,” she quipped. Her perky alabaster breasts stood at attention. Her bionic alabaster breasts made zim-zim noises. He sighed. The Martians were approaching. They had space suits. They had a space […]
Simon Perchik: Two Poems
* Falling where the sun refills, its light from somewhere in this darkness someplace near the floor, your footsteps eaten as shadows have always known — ceilings are ice and stone and hunger and valleys swallowing lush streams and songs. Your shadow is thinner now and still I can’t loosen it, not even at night […]