deceptive in its transparency, A mountain stream I could take a quick tube down And find myself whipped over, drowning, laughing. Give me a whiskey in a dark booth, two shots in the hand across the table insisting I have more. I want more. Make the booth leather, let the leather be torn, […]
Issue 86
Vievee Francis: Wolf
cause I was a bad boy, so my daddy tol me the story ‘bout the wolf and lil red rilin hood ~HowlinWolf 1 It’s licking your door knob You know it’s there (yesyoudo) Sound so subtle if not for the scent you might pretend it’s the rustle of needles over theporch boards you might pretend […]
Adam Falkner: Connor Everywhere But
after Jericho Brown Connor on the four train, sports page rolled into a drumstick. Connor stretched out shirtless on the front lawn, a football propped behind his head. Connor laughing against the red brick of a café, head thrown to the sky like a sail snapped by the song of a quick wind. Connor in […]
C.M. Clark: Ismene Upstaged
Ismene of the bottlebrush tree, how long can an eyebrow grow untweezed? What if it’s left to curl and punk-jut garden-random, scalp, eardrum, cornea, liberated as milkweed? How will you ever learn the proper shape or coax of comb to settle these tantrum hairs? At eleven, this is gnosis: the wafers of […]
Diana Spechler: My Boyfriend, Jesus
Today is the feast day of two Catholic saints–Saint Cletus and Saint Marcellinus–so of course I’m reminiscing about a guy I dated who thought he was Jesus. I don’t mean he thought he was Jesus in the enlightened, we-are-all-one sense, in which case he would have thought he was also Buzz Aldrin, Bill Clinton, Hillary […]
PBQ on the Small Presses: Understanding the Curatorial Logic of Four Way Books, first in a series, Edited by Miriam R. Haier
PBQ “Pressay” Project Marion Wrenn, Jason Schneiderman, Lorraine Doran and Miriam R. Haier met on September 9, 2012 for an essayistic conversation about the 2011 titles from Four Way Books. What can the books published by a small press in a single year tell us about editorial logic that pulls them together, and about the […]