Stephen, crushed by a steady migraine and a collection of kidney stones, has never shed the pique of original martyrdom. St. Stephen’s crown, as is well known, was broken open. Stephen means Crown. His faithful namesake was murdered for speaking the truth, so our Stephen lies and faithfully avoids church. For years, he’s been feeding […]
Issue 84
Mary Di Lucia: Policy on Letters
I want you to know I am unable to write back to you Though they are kind here There is no shortage of pencils or level surfaces There are no midges The ice is only merely bothersome No matter what you think, that I am cold that I wanted something else It’s simply that we […]
Mary Di Lucia: Failure
You were not expecting it to happen so quickly; the whole time you were preparing it passed by your house on a varnished sled whose runner was an old rocking horse. The harness was your missing shoelace. How right you took the time to fret about the nature of the anorak and sought an inflammable […]
Wendy Barnes-Thomassen: Stock Film, Sometime Mississippi Delta
The populist politico preached in black and white, fist pounding air promises out to every cowlicked, cracker- fed chicken lover. He boozed it down from Hicksville straight to Podunk, spewing blaspheme at the bourgeois, declaiming all powers, disclaiming every fraud that crawled from lunatic to Christendom and back, till by and by his sound truck […]
Wendy Barnes-Thomassen: Epiphany Sees Her Own Demise Foreshadowed
In the early, heady days, when the performance was still fresh, say when Athena flashed her spangling shepherd at Odysseus, I spread my fearsome wings and led him home. Now I dither in the rafters as the human seasons […]