by Barry Yedvobnick Just before our aging biology settled it, we decided there’ll never be a perfect time, when our lives ease and the lists are crossed out. So, along with the switch in jobs and locale, we turned from contraception to proception. It didn’t take long, and at forty-one weeks, we watched your heel […]
by Emma Patz Before we’re brought into the room with the one-way mirror, we wait in an empty office at the back of the station. We all look alike, which is to say, we all look like the suspect: white, gangly, with tired eyes and fried curls. “What do you think this one did?” I
by Shoshauna Shy My mother left our home for good when I was thirteen. She had been taking her dinner to the spare bedroom for quite awhile, episodes of “Call My Agent” playing on the TV, a burble of French urgency squeezing out the crack between the door and the floorboards. When I came home
by Emily Tong For discarding: a Chinese takeout carton, tin handle twisted into an abstract hourglass. The month’s worth of toe clippings inside it. Stray rice grains (not to be confused with clippings), flicked under the sofa to mess with the dog. A dozen or so newspaper headlines. These are things that catch the light
On Trash Day, 3 Miles Away From The Dead Deer Read More »
by Sheila E. Murphy Place yourself where she sat on the porch swingwith a jelly jar of wine she liked not the rot gut thingher man would sip that would take the paint off the old truck.Feel July breeze at night and the smell of the cropsthat feed us. Listen to the voice still here
by DS Maolalai one day I won’tbring my guitar.haven’t made musicmore than ten years,and I don’t missthe making of iteither very much.music doesn’t miss me:I have never had the fingerto pull tunes from timber,and singing I’m nothing but unpoetic bad – lead-flat and heavy, like a man removing boxesfrom the open back of a truck.but
by Mark J. Mitchell She put her nightmares on a diet. No more war newsfor her. Just old tunes, cartoons, cold war news. She sailed out of the bay under the red bridge. She sworeby tides, looking always west to see offshore news. Her phone ate messages. She barely glanced towardsthose screens. Facing the truth
by Konrad Ehresman At the café I am given a forkwith my croissant,civility imposedin silly little reminders,as if my fingers not feral enough forripping, as if consumption demands order,what animal self must I killin order to save my coat from crumbs? The chair, a vinyl thing with odd angledmetal legs, buckles under my weight,floor splayed,newborn,
by Caitlin Breen Just after seven I drove into the rain,which was mist until it wasn’t, until the airseemed to spawn raindrops at eye level,already moving at velocity toward the earth.The earth, which seems parched or else drowning. The earthwhich seems so steady beneath me. The nounwhich becomes proper when we drop the article: Earth,whose
by Cara Wang Zhong nan qing nu¹ is the proverb my mother mouths to me to explain the way nainai² holds my brother. Cradled by rivers of folded skin, my brother breathes victory into the crease above Grandma’s elbow, and her eyes are mirrors to the battles she’s fought. Her eyes are not mirrors for
Haibun for a War That Was Never Mine Read More »