Barbaracha’s Romance Chola, how I love you, chola, fresher than a just-picked apple, with your big gathered skirt and your blouse of finely woven cloth. Your laughter sparkles like crystals of frost. Your impish eyes twinkle like stars in the dawn sky. The sun plays upon your lips; the moon grows jealous of your broad […]
Issue 77
Teresa Leo: The Lasting
What we will remember is this— in the graveyard late at night, the brief curve of the body as we hoisted ourselves up the cemetery wall, that moment of hanging when weight shifted back to some image of ourselves holding out like kids in our parents’ kitchens when love fell away in knives and screams; […]
Teresa Leo: Junkie
I’m an off-ramp, a throughway, the last exit on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, where the cashier said I look like a cross between Elaine from Seinfeld and Alanis Morissette, or his high school prom date, who he left to get high with a cheerleader, bleachers, blackout, a second down at the last home football game of […]
Melody Lacina: Editor
She’s willing to admit bad spelling has never killed anyone. Still, she finds simple mistakes almost painful: an apostrophe misplaced in a plural possessive or, worse, in the form of /its/ when it’s not needed. She likes plain rules, /i/ before /e/ and hyphenation according to Webster. With grammar she’s less picky, more inclined to […]
Aron Keesbury: The Strippers
In the world endarkened by space between strobe, the words that slip like tongues to ears through drumbeats are only those that need pried the spaces for: whatever smooth touch of voice she feels the freshly shaven face deserves but otherwise surely mustn’t find. And only when he practices in hotel mirror compliments he thought […]
Anna Maria Hong: Anecdote of the Seed
Gone to seed to flower to fruit, I am the keeper of lime. I polish, I snip stem from leaf, I flatten, suture rind. Action. Has its merits: Consider the pip. I wish I were a pip, asleep and dreaming of lime. Last night, I dreamt my father was dead and I bursting with joy. […]