Featured
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Potholes
I waved across the college car park as my classmates got into…
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Cunning Folk
I met Michelle on a new dating app whose CEO had recently…
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Roman Holiday
I’d had no contact with my ex-husband Erwin for years, nor was…
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Two Poems
Jeffrey Tao has had a career as conference interpreter at the United Nations and has written many travelogues chronicling his impressions of international destinations. His literary work includes haikus on a variety of subjects and translations of poems from the Tang and Song dynasties, some of which have been published in magazines such as Adelaide, Belle…
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We Must Learn Not To Want What We Love
Kimberly Kralowec is the author of The Saplings Think of Us as Young (Kelson Books, 2023) and a chapbook, We retreat into the stillness of our own bones (Tolsun Books, 2022). Her poetry appears in journals such as The Shore, wildness, Twyckenham Notes, and The Inflectionist Review, and she was recently named a finalist…
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Two Poems
WAITING after Beth Stahlecker What can I do? Wish the day over like macular clouds making the palms waver under the pressure? I look through a thousand fronds diffused with sun flashing above visions of a beach set loose in the street and dull surfboards. Either she wasn’t at yoga or…
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A Saving Grace
Foreigners who live for any length of time in Japan soon discover that many of their experiences, both the delightful and demoralizing, prove to be not merely commonplace but identical to the experiences of most other foreigners. This may be equally true of ex-pats living in Ecuador or Senegal, and therefore a banality;…
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We’re the Same Now
The sun came in the windows midmorning—about 10am in summer—and then by midday it was overhead, leaking light down on that solitary house in the valley, making the surface tension on the dewdrops break and flow into pools of damp. You didn’t know if it was better to keep the lights on during the…
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Song
My mother had convinced herself—and us—that the landlord would never go through with it. But the eviction notice said the marshal would arrive at seven in the morning, and he did. She tried stopping him with lies. “Mr. Levine said he’ll wait for the rent,” she insisted. “He told me himself. I spoke to…
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Plain Sight
Tomorrow they will pull down the old fire station drill tower. Structural problems — they say. It’s not safe to pitch a ladder against it anymore. We were instructed to start practising our hoselines against the station wall after a portion of the roof caved in two summers ago. But word of the…
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The Miracles and Mindless Pursuits of Hilda Whitby
-1- One week after the fire claimed her grown son and English setter, her horses and wagons, her rifles and ledgers, her personal library, her precisely calibrated lab instruments and voluminous notebooks in which she’d recorded her secret chemical formulae, Hilda Whitby stood with her back to the riverbank and surveyed for a…
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Lucky Dip
Damn. Sotto voce of the mistake he considers he’s made. Damn. Louder… as, once more, he scans the beach. Which is empty, utterly emp— Except now, with his curse and a slight pivot of his position, it isn’t… empty, at all. A figure… a guy… a youngish guy… is crossing, and coming down, the…
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English Bay
I saw Ann the other day. I was walking down Granville Street, and I could smell the sea, that wild pungent smell that always grabs me. It had been raining, and the air was damp as only Vancouver air can be. I was on the side of the street where Hudson’s Bay still stands,…
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Him
I am trying at a bird. It won’t come out very well because I haven’t been painting long, but it’s soothing nonetheless and fills my time. Yesterday was the flower garden. It didn’t turn out the way I wanted either, but I’m determined to improve. The flower garden is just outside the window. The…
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Out of Tune
You’re watching a woman rob you. Your purse hangs under the bar on a peg, not even a foot away. The woman digging through your belongings isn’t discreet, but nobody stops her. That doesn’t happen in this kind of place. This lounge is underground—under O’Malley’s with its dark windows and neon glaze of bar…
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Abandoned Farmhouse
Stephen Behrendt is a native of northern Wisconsin, transplanted to Nebraska some forty years ago and now the George Holmes Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Nebraska, where his special interests are in the literature, art and culture of the “long” Romantic period. His poetry has been widely published and includes four book-length…
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The Custodian
That was the year I turned seventeen, and Mother started to rail on me a lot for the way I looked and the way I dressed. And Dad wasn’t there any more to defend me or just say “stop it.” “Chilton Ford!” My toes were already curling inside of my old sneakers. “You know…
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On Federal Highway 200 Near Salina Cruz
On Federal Highway 200 Near Salina Cruz It was late in the afternoon, and a gentle wind was pushing heat off the country when we found the man. Our traveling bicycle gang had split in two by this point — Robbie and I were riding ahead, and hadn’t seen Jamie or Alejandra for…
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Couch Street Blues
I moved to Portland, Oregon to get away from the East Coast. No more rat race. No demoralizing commutes. No snowy winters. I wanted to spend time in a city where there were things to do outside, where a typical week didn’t exclusively involve working your ass off Monday to Friday, then meeting up…
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Three Poems
Ruth Carr was born in Belfast, educated at Queen’s University, Stranmillis College and the University of Ulster, and has been a tutor in adult education since the early 1980s. She worked in community education at BIFHE (The Belfast Met) for over 15 years, mainly in adult literacy, inclusive learning and creative writing. Since then she…
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Something Beautiful and Pure
“We have only a little time to please the living, but all eternity to love the dead.” –Sophocles He insisted on ordering squid, or whatever that nice word is they use so you don’t know you’re ordering squid, even though she said she had tried it before and didn’t like it. Not as fresh…
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Alien powers
Alex Wylie is a poet and critic who lives in Leeds. His debut collection, Secular Games, was published by Eyewear in 2018, and a book on the later work of Geoffrey Hill, entitled Radiance of Apprehension, is forthcoming shortly. ALIEN POWERS ‘Have I really been in a battle?’ wondered Stendhal’s hero after…
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Young Women in Nightclubs
“They called her the Tenth Muse.” “What’s a muse?” “Um. Well, it’s a goddess who inspires writers, artists, dancers, poets—you know, that sort of thing. The inspired people were almost all male, of course. I supposed they liked the idea of female assistance.” “But she wasn’t a goddess, was she?” “No. And not really…
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December, Frame-by-Frame
Kate H. Koch is a graduate student at Harvard Extension School, where she is pursuing an ALM degree in Creative Writing and Literature. Kate is fascinated by all things macabre, and you can find her work in The Metaworker, Club Plum, BOMBFIRE, Cholla Needles, and Minnesota’s Best Emerging Poets of 2019: An Anthology, as well…
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Dolores
Dolores wanted to name her Joy, but he wouldn’t have it. He said Joy wasn’t a name; it was an emotion. She said that was exactly the point. She wanted to mark her daughter the same way her mother had marked her, but not to wallow, disheartened and overwhelmed, but to bubble rapidly, burst…
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A Man of Faith
It’s a hard-won thing, this vacation, a treat that Christine and Marc put on their bucket list for retirement. Carrying it out has proved tricky. Here they are, in Tuscany, where Marc has long wanted to spend a month in an Italian villa. They have rented it with housekeeping, the easier to host their…
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Cardinals
When I write about my mother, my pen likes to compare her to birds without my permission. I write her voice like sparrows, high and tittering when she laughs. As an angst-ridden teen, my word of choice for her was ‘crow’, pecking away at me bit by bit. She became a character composed of…
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Hamza
A high-pitched clarion yelp rang out from under the hood, alarming the couple who had left the car in an alley for want of a parking space. Hastily cutting the ignition, they ran out to find from whence issued this half human, half animal voice of such impressive carrying power. The large pair of…
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Burning
Porsha Monique Allen is a resident and native of Richmond, Virginia. She received her MFA from Queens University of Charlotte. Her work has appeared and is forthcoming in Scene & Heard Journal, Apricity Press, Obsidian, Scalawag Magazine, and Rattle. She was selected as a semi-finalist for Naugatuck River Review’s 12th Annual Narrative Poetry Contest. Burning…
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Rhode Island
Amanda Cleary is a high school student in the suburbs of Philadelphia. She began writing in third grade and hasn’t stopped since. She plays the mellophone for her school’s marching band, and spends the rest of her time reading and talking to her parakeet. RHODE ISLAND Rain falling past a red truck…
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Two Poems
Jeffrey Tao holds a degree in Russian Studies from Sussex University. He has had a career as conference interpreter at the United Nations in New York, continuing to serve the organization on a freelance basis. He has translated poems from the Tang Dynasty and prose writings from the 20s, 30s and 40s. He has written…
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Stump
Helen wakes at night and complains that there is something in her hair. To begin with, my word that there is nothing there is sufficient to reassure her. But, over time, she has grown convinced. Typically, she wakes at 3 or 4 am. She pulls at her hair and scratches her scalp. ‘Helen, please…
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Three Poems
Charles Rafferty’s twelfth collection of poems is The Smoke of Horses (BOA Editions, 2017). His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, O, Oprah Magazine, Prairie Schooner, and Ploughshares, and his stories have appeared in The Southern Review and Per Contra. His story collection is Saturday Night at Magellan’s. He has won the 2016 NANO…
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Winter in Kashmir
The family gave me objects to put under the blankets, to keep me warm. They gave me a wicker basket filled with hot coals. They gave me an orange cat. Their garden was barren except for yellow winter roses. When I walked toward the house, I would quicken my pace, trying to get out…
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Alfred Polgar: the limitations of culture
“The fate of the emigrant: a foreign country cannot become a homeland. Yet the homeland becomes a foreign country.” Born in Vienna in the latter part of the 19th century, the critic and essayist Alfred Polgar died in a Zurich hotel room in 1955. Exiled by Hitler’s rise to power, and only relatively recently returned…
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Sundowning
It was a Sunday, early evening, spring. New leaves shining in the trees along both sides of MacLellan Street forming a vivid, protective canopy. A current of regulated security glittering in the air, in the ordered rows of parked cars, the sheen of cleaned windows. Clayton Beale, his mind alert, his hands trembling, stood…
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The Poor Guy
He’s standing at the Montargis train station waiting for me when I arrive. It’s nearly empty at this hour on a Saturday morning, so I spot him immediately. His hair isn’t as bright blonde as I remember – rather a faded caramel – and he seems shorter from where I stand across the train…
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Care
Peter Leight lives in Amherst, Massachusetts. He has previously published poems in the Paris Review, AGNI, Antioch Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, FIELD, and other magazines. Care When I’m being careful I walk around the room and pick up some things in order to put them down, taking a pill or two to…
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The Living are just The Dead on Holiday
She postponed looking at her grandmother till last, dwelling on all that surrounded the coffin, all that was familiar to her: a polished harmonium smelling of sawdust; a Bible, the edge of its closed pages broad-brushed in gold; twenty-five black-bordered cards of condolence; a vase of chrysanthemums, and a thrusting Amaryllis in a world…
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Barbarian Studies
Aidan Coleman’s poems have appeared in Glasgow Review of Books, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, Poetry Ireland Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review among others. His first two collections of poetry, Avenues & Runways and Asymmetry, both published by Brandl & Schlesinger, were shortlisted for national book awards in Australia, and his third book of poems, Mount Sumptuous,…
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Wisteria
Barbara Daniels’s Talk to the Lioness was published by Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press in 2020. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Lake Effect, Cleaver, Faultline, Small Orange, Meridian, and elsewhere. Barbara Daniels received a 2020 fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. WISTERIA An emerald leaf pales to…
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Allie
After Jack had left the blue house in Enterprise Hills, taking along with him the organic cotton sheets on which they had so often slept together and the expensive French press that had been an un-wedding gift from friends, Allie had breathing room. For the first time in months that felt like years, she…
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A Forever Girlhood
The first time I leave, I’m nineteen and my mom is crying in the airport. I laugh instead of hugging her and make her stand in front of a sign that reads “Trauma Kit” while I take a picture, hoping it will diffuse the tension because I’m not sure I can parallel her sadness….
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Supine
The fluorescents disclose the silver in James’ slick hair. When they flicker out, we’re left in the bluish light of evening. “So, do you like college?” He chops a red bell pepper. I take a sip of my coffee and nod, my hands molded around the white ceramic. I don’t know how he knows…
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Earth’s Very Atmosphere
No one is home. The ceiling fan still turns in the living room of this flat in western Kuala Lumpur, but otherwise nothing stirs. When Tatsuya Segawa gets back from the office tonight, he will once again find the place a shambles. Every toy Minoru owns, and every household item Aoi has pressed into…
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TEACHING BALLET TO CHILDREN ON ZOOM DURING A PANDEMIC
Ellis Elliott is a ballet teacher and writer in Juno Beach, Florida. She is currently pursuing an MFA at Queens University in Charlotte, NC. Her work can be found in Neologism Poetry Journal, Literary Mama, and upcoming in Evening Street Review. TEACHING BALLET TO CHILDREN ON ZOOM DURING A PANDEMIC First, you…
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Correspondence
The letter lay unopened on the kitchen table for nearly a week before the old man finally succumbed to his curiosity. It had been tucked innocently between the telephone bill and an ad pamphlet, marked with a decorative floral stamp and neatly hand-addressed—only not to him. His home’s address was indeed written below the…
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Akiko Hara lives in Hakone, Japan. She works as an illustrator and gardener’s assistant. She has been published in 森林浴 and The Silent Hand, and has a small pamphlet of poems entitled, Flinch. On the wet fields, shining silver after rain, I lie under the sun, thinking of nothing. I take long lonely walks;…
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Two Poems
Clara Burghelea is a Romanian-born poet with an MFA in Poetry from Adelphi University. Recipient of the Robert Muroff Poetry Award, her poems and translations appeared in Ambit, HeadStuff, Waxwing, The Cortland Review and elsewhere. Her collection The Flavor of The Other was published in 2020 with Dos Madres Press. She is the Translation/International Poetry…
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Das Ewig-Weibliche
Boris Kokotov is a poet and translator, the author of several poetry collections. His translations of selected poems of contemporary Russian poets to English appeared in Adelaide, Blackbird, InTranslation- BrooklynRail, Poet Lore, and Washington Square Review, among others. He lives in Baltimore. Vadim Molodiy was born in Moscow, 1947. He studied medicine and received a…
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Two Poems
Rachael Hershon’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in failbetter, Amaryllis, and Bop Dead City, among others. A proud Massachusetts native, she currently teaches English in the greater Boston area. Landscape, Childhood City Stars sink behind duplexes, snow-worn streets, press thin light onto pavement. Saxonville, I must leave you, but tomorrow they…
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Everything We Try to Be
Bangladeshi-born Sujash Purna is a graduate student at Missouri State University. A poet based in Springfield, Missouri, he serves as an assistant poetry editor to the Moon City Review. His poetry has appeared in Naugatuck River Review, Kansas City Voices, Poetry Salzburg Review, English Journal, Stonecoast Review, Red Earth Review, Emrys Journal, Prairie Winds, Gyroscope…
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Sunset Beaming Into Elementary School
Zeli M. Miceli is a recent graduate from the MFA program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation at Queens College. Their work in drama has been staged at Dixon Place and The SoHo Playhouse. Their other literary work has appeared in Foglifter Press and QC Voices. Zeli teaches at Queens College and lives in New…
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Lake George
The white Volkswagen Jetta veered onto a pebbled road. It snaked through a dense forest and in the darkness Jon couldn’t make out any street signs or markers. Only when the car had already turned into the driveway did the headlights illuminate a stone pillar that read Abbott, and he was thankful that Margot…
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How To Explain
Abby Caplin’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in AGNI, Love’s Executive Order, Manhattanville Review, Midwest Quarterly, Salt Hill, TSR: The Southampton Review, Tikkun, and elsewhere. She has been a finalist for the Rash Award in Poetry, semi-finalist for the Willow Run Poetry Book Award, finalist for the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Poetry Award, and a winner…
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Hosea
Max’s barking roused him from his black-coffee reverie, staring at its smooth steaming surface, waiting for it to cool, reflecting on Clara’s failing memory even though she was hardly an old woman, two years his junior, in fact—a point she enjoyed ribbing him about, especially on his birthdays. The sound rolled on the wind,…
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Improbable History of the Mysterious Lady
“Improbable History of the Mysterious Lady”: Domestication of Gothic in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall Section I: The Gothic as Prototype All novels are, or should be, written for both men and women to read, and I am at a loss to conceive how a man should permit himself to write…
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Bumps in the Road
If you fly over Jackson Heights on approach to LaGuardia airport, the neighborhood appears as a cluster of leafy blocks pierced by dozens of brick apartment buildings. And if you had happened to fly over on one particular summer afternoon, with binoculars and exceptional eyesight, you just might have witnessed what appeared to be me…
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Three Poems
Cordelia Hanemann is currently a practicing writer and artist in Raleigh, NC. She has published in such journals as Turtle Island Quarterly, Connecticut River Review, Mainstreet Rag, and Laurel Review and in several anthologies: The Well-Versed Reader, Heron Clan IV, and Kakalak 2018. She has published a chapbook, Through a Glass Darkly, and her poem,…
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Specter
Julia swirled her glass of pinot noir. The dim lighting in the bar flattered Sam’s angular face and blondish hair. Julia took a sip and pushed the gold-rimmed glasses up the bridge of her nose. Sam stirred his straw in his old fashioned, now a glass of khaki-colored ice and a cherry stem. A…
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Kussend Paar
Try as he might, he could not recall Brian Geist. After all, nearly forty years had passed, and no shred of memory, not the slightest personal detail, survived. When Bo was a boy, his family had hosted American students through various exchange programs. Geist claimed to have stayed with them for only a couple…
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All the Life
On January 28, 2018 my mom dies for fourteen minutes. My sister and I are first told it’s twenty, but the doctors will later correct themselves, pleased with that extra six minutes they spared her. We aren’t sure what difference that makes. But it seems important and so we catalogue it in our…
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El Paso
Phoebe stood at the edge of the highway, looking left, then right. It was just past dawn. Nothing up yet but a pack of coyotes, trotting loose limbed on the other side of a barbed wire fence, nose to ground on a hunt. One glanced at Phoebe, turned away and followed the others along…
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Two Poems
Charles Rafferty’s most recent collections of poems are The Smoke of Horses (BOA Editions, 2017), Something an Atheist Might Bring Up at a Cocktail Party (Mayapple Press, 2018), and The Problem With Abundance (Grayson Books, 2019). His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, O, Oprah Magazine, Gettysburg Review, Cincinnati Review, Prairie Schooner, and Ploughshares….
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The Sudden End of Everything
The front window of the coffee shop explodes outwards as the bomb goes off. I see it clear as anything. It kills the young mother and her baby in the pram first, then it rips through the homeless man, bundled up in charity blankets on the other side of the path. The blast tears…
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Fried Baby Artichokes
Emily Hyland’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Brooklyn Review, Neologism Poetry Journal, Sixfold, The Virginia Normal, and Stretching Panties. A restaurateur and English professor from New York City, she received her MFA in poetry and her MA in English education from Brooklyn College. Her cookbook, Emily: The Cookbook, was published by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, in…
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Second Language
“M-U-E-R-T-E,” he spelled out in the boy’s second language so that he couldn’t understand that there was death in the room with them. It was his parents’ language, the one that contained words he understood but could not yet spell out. Being that her eyes were swelling with grief, the woman tried desperately not…
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Two Poems
Christie Towers is a poet living in the Boston area. She is currently pursuing an MFA in Poetry at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Her work can be found in Narrative Magazine, the Ohio Edit, SummerStock and Reality Hands. PYRITE The first poems I ever wrote for you, you requested. And now we’re…
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Tap Water
Matt Dennison’s work has appeared in Rattle, Bayou Magazine, edivider, Natural Bridge, The Spoon, River Poetry Review and Cider Press Review, among others. He has also made short films with Michael Dickes, Swoon, and Marie Craven. TAP WATER Cool drink of water from the kitchen sink at midnight, faucet turned as the rain…
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Changes
None have seen the Barnacle Goose’s nest or egg; nor is this surprising since such geese are said to have spontaneous generation. When the fir masts or planks of ships have rotted in the sea, a kind of fungus breaks out upon them in which after time the form of birds may be seen;…
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Accidental modernist: the nonsense poetry of Christian Morgenstern
In his comparatively brief life, Christian Morgenstern, born 1871, was a writer of sketches and short pieces (feuilleton) for newspapers, an editor, among others, of Robert Walser, and a translator of Ibsen’s poems and lyric dramas. He also published a series of collections of lyric poems which formed the centrepiece of his serious literary…
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Transverse Orientation
Transverse Orientation To watch moths as a pastime is known as mothing. Nothing is known about what makes one inclined to mother or less inclined to that sort of glow curio. Moth-er with — unexpectedly — the short O of body rather than the O Oh of that longer load zooming in on the…
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The Im/Im Podcast
THE IM/IM PODCAST 1. – Arthur Havens? – On the line. – Pardon me. He’s on another line? – Sorry. It’s what my father always said. You know, when the call was for him and he answered it. What do you say? – When? – When you pick up and somebody says your name…
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IF THE ORCHID IN QUESTION WERE A PINK AND WHITE LADY’S SLIPPER
On the drive out to the cabin, Jeff and Miranda barely spoke. It was the first time she’d been to Minnesota. They had planned the trip during a happier time, when the suggestion of meeting his family had sounded like a promise. The air conditioner in the rental car was barely working. Miranda…
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from THE TATTOO GARDEN OF CAPPELA
Michael H. Brownstein’s book, A Slipknot Into Somewhere Else: A Poet’s Journey To The Borderlands Of Dementia, was published by Cholla Needles Press in 2018. He presently lives with his wife in Missouri. from The Tattoo Garden of Cappela Now the wheat grass starts to wade away, the anger in the valley growing softer,…
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A Particular Friendship
Medbh McGuckian was born in Belfast in 1950. She studied at Queen’s University, earning a BA and MA, and was later appointed the institution’s first female writer-in-residence. She has won the National Poetry Competition, The Cheltenham Award, The Rooney Prize, the Bass Ireland Award for Literature, the Denis Devlin Award, the Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize…
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Two Poems
Courtney Cook is an MFA candidate at the University of California, Riverside, and a graduate of the University of Michigan. She has been published in the Cerurove, the Manifest-Station, Thought Catalog, and Soapvox, and is the winner of a Hopwood Award in Nonfiction. BAY BLUES i. We sparked a joint called Tango Haze,…
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Two Poems
Barbara Daniels’ book, Rose Fever was published by WordTech Press, and the chapbooks Black Sails, Quinn & Marie, and Moon Kitchen by Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press. Her poetry has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Mid-American Review and elsewhere. She received three fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. WRITING ENGLISH GRAMMAR…
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Two Poems
Ted McCarthy is a poet and translator living in Clones, Ireland. His work has appeared in magazines in Ireland, the UK, Germany, the USA, Canada and Australia. He has had two collections published: November Wedding, and Beverly Downs. SUGAR CUBE There is no thirteenth floor where they sit watching the river carve its…
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Sea Shanty
27th November 1781 Today I scrubbed my hands clean until they were red and swollen with anguish and small dots of red blood prickled across my knuckles. It gave me no pleasure to do so, but for a few moments, those few short moments before my nerve endings prickled in alarm, I felt…
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Love Thy Neighbor’s Trees
When the family next door moved out 15 years ago, they left behind a potted ficus. For weeks, the tree stood by the trash, begging to be watered. I dragged it to our courtyard and flooded it. It came back. Green buds became leaves. Twigs grew into branches. A year later, that plant-abandoning neighbor—a…
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Moscow Carousel
‘Aren’t you getting a little old for this?’ said Elizaveta Entina as she walked past Tatyana Smekhova into Tatyana Smekhova’s flat. Smekhova looked out onto the landing for a moment. No one else was there and, despite her haughty demeanour, inside herself she was relieved. She closed the flat’s outer door and pushed the…
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Do You Know Where You’re Going?
“Do you know where you’re going?” Genuine concern edged the driver’s voice as he stood at the open bay of the Greyhound bus with hands on hips, sizing up the small, gray-haired woman. She was dressed in Army surplus pants and a plaid shirt, and she had asked to be let off at a…
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To the loveliest cloud
Megan Waring is a poet, playwright and fiber artist who currently resides in Boston. She holds a BA in Creative Writing from Virginia Tech and is currently earning her MFA in poetry from the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Her work is forthcoming or published in Salamander, Nailed Magazine, Mortar Magazine, The Legendary, and Pulp Literature,…
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Unsolicited opinions on flower arranging
You can make a flower arrangement out of anything. It helps to use at least a few flowers, especially if you want other people to call your creation a “flower arrangement.” It also helps to use some things that are not flowers. I generally use other parts of plants for this purpose. Some people…
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Los Días de Sus Ojos
Upon entering the bathroom of the bank, the third man yanked off his rubber Trump mask. Now that Jules finally could see his face, he realized that the man was, in fact, just a boy, seventeen, eighteen at most. Fear filled his watery eyes, obvious even in the reflection of the mirror across from…
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Poetic Self-Defence
When using poetry as a method of self-defence you need to start with the basics. It’s easier to disarm or incapacitate a potential assailant with form and structure than with content. Not that content can’t have devastating effects – it can. But generally only in expert hands. The simplest moves in poetic self-defence are…
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Outgrowing the Giant in my Bedroom
When the daylight fades & the florescent harshness envelops you both, you see the steady lines & try to remember the reasons & how you were once contented with cold church steps & shared cigarettes. You remember how the heap of clothing you slithered out of after lunch resembled a lost hound in…
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Five Poems
Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, Forge, Poetry, Osiris, The New Yorker and elsewhere. His most recent collection is The Osiris Poems published by boxofchalk, 2017. For more information, including free e-books and his essay “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities” please visit his website at www.simonperchik.com. From far…
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Pebbles of Amber Picked up on the Easternmost Edge of Eurasia
It was in 1990 when T. J. G. Harris, my mentor of poetry and a regular contributor to P N Review at that time, kindly gave me The Irish for No and Belfast Confetti, saying ‘the poet might have something.’ Through these Bloodaxe paperbacks, I was initiated to Carson’s newly invented style of long lines….
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Trapped in Time
At sixteen, I was exactly half the age of Brian. My best friend, Laura, said, “He’s a whole lot cuter than any of the guys at school, Shelby.” “That’s my dad!” Other friends made similar comments, but none of them ever did anything about it—not like Laura. On our visits to his messy-as-a-dorm-room efficiency…
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Cloud Life
She arrives a few minutes late for the appointment, hoping to appear fashionable, as if delayed by a function, but having used the extra time to subdue her anxiety. Surely, others have perpetrated this lie, pretended the affluence that could afford such a home just to get a look. She can’t help wondering how…
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Blue Monkeys
Anna woke at 4:00, the numbers wide-eyed on the little travel clock, and after half an hour or so slept again. It was quiet by then, and the heat had broken—though not her own, not yet. She woke not knowing who she was, with the strange slatted light on the strange wall, one of…
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Letter to Sandro, the Butcher of Piazza Vittorio
I sit down at my desk to write a letter to Rome, the city of love and the death of love and love that dies trying to be born. I think of Piazza Vittorio, on the Esquiline Hill. The four plaza walls are made of apartments built during the Risorgimento, the period after Garibaldi…
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Night People
The odor of cheap perfume invades my breathing space. It clings to me. I consider moving to another booth and calculate the trouble. I measure it against the smothering stench thinking, Why should I have to move? The smell reminds me of a decaying cocktail lounge where the smoke from a million cigarettes has…
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Skin Theory
The Home’s western boundary were the tracks of the Liberty Bell Line, a trolley that had operated between Allentown and Philadelphia in the nineteen-forties. It was a single track on a ballast of rubble-filled earth that arched over our creek, a shallow meandering stream which had been re-channelled through a concrete tunnel. By 1956,…
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3 guys on holiday
DS Maolalai is a poet from Ireland who has been writing and publishing poetry for almost 10 years. His first collection, Love is Breaking Plates in the Garden, was published in 2016 by the Encircle Press. He has a second collection forthcoming from Turas Press in 2019. 3 guys on holiday we took the boat…
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False Idols
Jill and I are only friends for one reason. I think we’ve both always known. We weren’t even ever really friends, just drawn together by our mutual love for Causby, and our need to keep it alive. Jill is his ex-girlfriend; I’m his best friend’s little sister. Her chance with him is over, and…
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Shoes
“Bert,” said Molly from across the open floor, “shoes over here.” The thrift shop was really just an old three story home, shabby and dimly lit, converted years prior to sell useless throwaways. She uncaringly turned and waddled on, curbing her right hand around the bump on her abdomen as she went….
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We’re Looking For Our Friend, We Don’t Know His Name
In the morning Webby was gone. The Sofa was empty, all the cushions piled up for a pillow, the blanket that Molly had given him half on the floor. The telephone was in the middle of the room, the cord pulled tight like a trip wire. Barbara put it back where it was supposed to…
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Griefers
This is what happens the night Eames’s sister comes back to town. Cue Bucky over by the pinball machines with a horde of friends watching him, two or three guys sucking on sodas and hanging over his shoulders. Two or three guys isn’t really a horde, but Bucky has a way of making it…
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Two Poems
Mark Seidl lives in New York’s Hudson Valley, where he works as a rare-books librarian. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Hotel Amerika, Unbroken Journal, New Delta Review, and elsewhere. Vermeer’s Young Woman with a Water Jug You want pure attention like hers to whatever is going on in the…
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Fading Horizons
Fading Horizons: Regarding the Decline of American Mall Culture For those of us who grew up during the 1980s, the indoor mall—first etched into the landscape by architect Victor Gruen three decades earlier—was a hub of life and teenage social activity. At the mall, we enjoyed a shared destination, a space…
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The Furthest Distance
A series of illustrations by the Irish artist, Rachel Clarke, commissioned by Netherlea Press for Lucy Caldwell’s novella, The Furthest Distance Platform 1 Journal New York In the pub Passing train
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Three Years in Benghazi
Three Years in Benghazi: Libya 1982-4 “Societies in which the existence and unity of the family are threatened, in any circumstances, are similar to fields whose plants are in danger of being swept away or threatened by drought or fire, or of withering away.” “All that is beyond the satisfaction of needs…
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The Most Bitchin’ Brontë
The Most Bitchin’ Brontë: Unleashed Animus in Wuthering Heights Feminist readings of 19th Century British literature are complicated by the fact that the rising awareness of certain issues like cruelty to animals and the mistreatment of children—issues that have always cleaved to feminist theory—challenge social and legal realities at their ideological foundations. The fact…
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The Anna Pierrepont Series
The following works are taken from Howard Skrill’s ongoing project, the Anna Pierrepont Series. Howard wanders around New York City, rolling a Whole Foods cart jammed with art supplies, a Bristol pad, and folding chair, in order to make plein air pictures of public statuary (and occasionally their absence) with the intention of documenting…
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REQUIEM FOR CLEO
Rick’s cell phone rang while he was at work. He should have let it go to voicemail, and would have, had he not looked and saw it was Linda. “Hi,” he said, not without some trepidation. She was crying. “Linda, what’s wrong?” It took a moment for her to speak. “She’s…she’s dead,” Linda said…
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Third Person
In November, after the Kroger next to my apartment installed a system of security cameras and monitors, assumedly to cut down on shoplifting by making it clear that SOMEONE WAS ALWAYS WATCHING, even if that someone was you, I began visiting the store regularly, for no real reason other than to watch myself walk…
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Images of my Mother
Summer vacation was almost here, but my photography professor, Jeff Weiss, said going on vacation was no reason to stop shooting pictures, that making pictures every day of your life was how real photographers lived. I wanted to be a real photographer. That summer after my freshman year of college, I stayed with Mom…
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The Sportsman of the Year Award
The keystone of my admiration of Vernon was his understanding that to some, if the stakes are high enough, a tiny imperfection is intolerable. I met him at a racket club I joined after getting back from Germany, and we liked each other right away. We had a lot in common. A couple of…
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Artworks
Rebecca Pyle’s last art studio was between two vast historic train depots, the Union Pacific and the Rio Grande, in Salt Lake City. Her paintings appear in the New England Review, Watershed Review, and on the covers of Oxford Magazine, Raven Chronicles Journal and The Underwater American Songbook (a chapbook of her poetry, published by…
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Where Dirt’s Disturbed, the Limit of the Self Extends
Kathleen Hellen is the author of The Only Country Was the Color of My Skin (2018), the award-winning collection Umberto’s Night, and two chapbooks, The Girl Who Loved Mothra and Pentimento. Nominated for the Pushcart and Best of the Net, and featured on Poetry Daily, her poems have been awarded the Washington Writers’ Poetry Prize,…
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Julia’s Child
Julia’s Child I wrote a poem for us, you say Silence Go on then A tendril of hair pushed back behind an ear You look grave, and somehow your mouth is sexier — I want to bite your lips It’s called ‘The Orchard’ Like the play? Yes, like the play. Though not,…
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Nativity
Joanie circled the cul-de-sac and pulled in behind the moving truck. She cut the engine, and the wagon rattled quiet. She sat a moment in silence, looking at his progress so far. Their furniture was on the lawn, in the exact setup of the living room. The plaid couch faced the street, bookended by…
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Driving Lenin’s Ghost
“Should we be here?” she asked. “Why not?” he said. “We’ve as much right as any.” “But they’re locking up,” she said. “I can hear them. I can hear their keys.” “Good!” he said. “What do you mean ‘Good’?” she said. “Let them!” he said. “But how will we get home?” she asked. “In…
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The Wind-up Cat Chronicle
I woke from a deep sleep and lay on my back for a good minute, looking through the window at the autumn sky, which was clear after a week of rain. Then suddenly I had this strange feeling. You were lying next to me, very still. For a second I panicked. Then I remembered…
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Two Poems
Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, Forge, Poetry, Osiris, The New Yorker and elsewhere. His most recent collection is The Osiris Poems, published by box of chalk in 2017. Untitled 1 You dead still look out at water are sheltered inside these row-houses laid down along the…
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Robert the Painter
Leontia Flynn is the author of three collections of poetry. Her most recent, Profit and Loss, was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Her work has received many accolades including an Eric Gregory Award, the Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. She lives in Belfast where she…
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Five Poems
Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, Forge, Poetry, Osiris, The New Yorker and elsewhere. His most recent collection is The Gibson Poems published by Cholla Needles Arts & Literary Library, 2019. For more information including free e-books and his essay “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities” please visit his website…
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AGAINST THE GRAIN OF MOTHERHOOD
AGAINST THE GRAIN OF MOTHERHOOD: POST-PARTUM PSYCHOSIS AND THE NARRATIVE WE DON’T WANT TO TELL Worst Night I stand by the crib. My son, just fifteen days old, sleeps inside. It’s three-something in the morning, and I alternate between pacing the room, sitting on the nearby rocking chair, and standing by the crib….
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Guests
It was starting to become a thing, my going up to the wrong person. I would go up to a guest, for example, thinking it was one of my parents, and only when the person responded would I realize that it wasn’t one of my parents. It had happened four times in the past…
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Rilke: Translations from French
James Owens’s most recent collection of poems is Mortalia (FutureCycle Press, 2015). His poems, stories, and translations appear widely in literary journals, including recent or upcoming publications in The Fourth River, Waxwing, Adirondack Review, Tule Review, The American Journal of Poetry, and Southword. He earned an MFA at the University of Alabama and lives in…
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The Wolf Tone
ONE Lily’s in the window-seat in pyjamas, legs tucked under, the grubby soles of her feet showing. She offers the wraith of a smile. When Aidan stoops to kiss her, Lily puts up her mouth and passively accepts his early-morning kiss. Aidan takes note. Lily’s moods govern the atmosphere in the household;…
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Five Poems
Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, Forge, Poetry, Osiris, The New Yorker and elsewhere. His most recent collection, The Osiris Poems, was published by box of chalk in 2017. For more information, including free e-books and his essay “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities”, please visit his website at simonperchik.com….
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HORATIA
What to wear? I had gone to bed to escape the question, and more serious ones, too. When I woke—too early, nervous, excited—I had to smile. Worrying about my clothes? Apart from my street-bought J’Aime Paris sweatshirt and old gray sweatpants I had only two options, the purple dress and the black, neither what…
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A Planted Flag
The December afternoon had closed in. It was dark already. As she trailed him up the short path, she glanced at the miniature Christmas tree glittering in the bay window. Darren reached out, pressed the doorbell. ‘It’s a very desirable area, this,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘Don’t stay on the market long.’…
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Take the Biscuit
— Oh hi, how are you? — I’m good, thank you. How are you? — How’s the job? — It’s great, actually. — Well that’s … that’s the diplomatic thing to say. — No it’s good – I mean, it’s working out good. — About cleaning toilets! — I guess you could say that,…
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Give or Take a Few
Forty-six steps from her door to the elevator. Three-hundred-and-seventy-nine to the Starbucks on Astor Place—where she did not work. Five-hundred-and-seventeen more to the Starbucks at Barnes & Noble—where she also did not work. One foot in front of the other: left right left right left right left, six-hundred-and-twenty-three paces to the Starbucks at Broadway…
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La Movida Madrileña
Forty years ago I spent a year in Madrid, in a rented studio apartment on the sixth floor of a narrow brick apartment building on bustling Calle de la Princesa. One room that came fully-furnished with two single beds which we lashed together with twine—thin, tick mattresses on metal frames, like the institutional beds…
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The Struggle
Peter Leight lives in Amherst, Massachusetts. He has previously published poems in the Paris Review, AGNI, Antioch Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, FIELD, and other magazines. The Struggle Falling back when the others advance, advancing when they fall back, we live in reverse. throwing away our calendars— in a hurry but not rushing, this…
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Shivers
I started working at Shivers ice cream shop in April, midway through my last semester at community college and just before I was set to transfer to a university halfway across the country. I’d finally gotten my crap together and lived up to the academic potential that had always eluded me. I’m not sure…
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Belle de Jour
It’s not enough to see Belle de Jour as an erotic classic. Such an appellation might be justified of a film preoccupied with a conventional cinematic rendering of soft focus bodies breathing heavily over a melodious soundtrack. Not so Belle de Jour. Certainly it is an erotic picture, but not for the reasons one might…
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Two Poems
Christie Towers is a poet living in the Boston area. She is currently pursuing an MFA in Poetry at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Her work can be found in Narrative Magazine, the Ohio Edit, SummerStock and Reality Hands. No Sense today my friend tells me she doesn’t understand god and later…
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Fly Little Baby Bird
In the hollow of her hands was a dead baby bird. Its tiny wings tucked in and its head pulled back, beak open. Black spaces for eyes, its body a scaly grey and pink dotted with vivid blue feathers. She was sitting on the edge of her bed, a look of gentle concentration on…
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The Soul is the Bread of Life
I pour the milk into the bowl and whisk it into the beaten eggs, and then add the flour slowly so as not to create lumps. The batter must be smooth and glossy as the inside of the conch shell that sits on my nightstand. I’m getting ready to add baking powder when I hear…
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A Few of a Party
We bring our handsome spouse to a party in the afternoon lights where the trees talk of winter and young girls photosynthesize the talk. Most of the guests find us dull, and we comply. There is little to say to winter. The girls bring their trees to talk. The other adults, who…
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Sweets for Breakfast
Alex Wylie is a poet and critic who lives in Leeds. His debut collection, Secular Games, and a book on the later work of Geoffrey Hill, Radiance of Apprehension, are both forthcoming in 2018. Sweets for Breakfast Sweets for breakfast, all the crap of the day complete in one convenient sitting like…
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Rideaux & Cadeau
“Oh, oh! Those schoolgirl knees! But, ech! the filthy whore… Fire, Fire! Capuchins! Coco Coco! Fascist fire in the gutters!” The puke-green digits on my little clock-radio declared it was, once again, the dark night of the soul. How does that withered thorax generate so many decibels? Fire! The word shattered my sleep. For…
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The Afterlives of Georg Trakl
In the early 1950s, the American poet James Wright, wandered by mistake into the wrong classroom while studying at the University of Vienna and joined a seminar on the poet Georg Trakl. He describes how the professor leading the seminar read Trakl’s poems slowly, with enormous patience, in the twilit room. The only other…
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Juhani Pallasmaa: Towards an Architecture Fit for the Human Body and Spirit
The Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa has led an exemplary career, completing buildings such as the sober and sensual Finnish Cultural Centre in Paris (1991) and the vast Kamppi bus terminal in Helsinki (2003). A gregarious, generous figure, full of energy at the age of 73, he has influenced generations of architects through his teaching around…
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The Universal Key
The Universal Key My father collected keys. He’d always collected keys, from childhood. He had thousands. Maybe more – tens of thousands. But of course the one key that he was looking for had always eluded his grasp. His collection was never complete. There were some keys – important collectors’ keys – that…
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Ballade
I’m a Midwestern girl, born and raised in Zionsville, a suburb of Indianapolis. I’m still in Indiana, working on a master’s degree at IU’s Jacobs School of Music. I was an undergraduate at the University too, with a double major in Music and French. I’m like a lot of my kind—that is, highly educated…
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LEAVING HUMBOLDT REDWOODS STATE PARK
LEAVING HUMBOLDT REDWOODS STATE PARK Now, the Michigan trees are too small. I long for the low hum of those long lives, with their enormous thirst for the cool mists off the ocean, and the calm I felt even as the dark waters rose, threatening to pull me down. My beloved joined me…
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Rope-Maker
When Philippe summoned me to his office, I figured I was in hot water over my last feature. Perhaps the Minister of Education had complained about my choice of adjectives or, worse, turned up some inaccuracy. I grabbed my notes. “No, no complaints from on high,” said Philippe. “Not yet, at least. No, I’ve…
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The Tipping Line
This is an extract from a longer poem still in progress, ‘The Tipping Line’, written to the son of my friends Ken and Jane Vickers. Rowan studied drama at Julliard and is now acting professionally in New York. Earlier sections of the poem reference WWI veteran James Whale who found fame in 1928 directing R…
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Threepenny Therapy
Call it what you will – Fate, luck, happenstance, stupidity. It doesn’t matter. I had been feeling a bit edgy for quite a while. So, when someone assaulting me on a bus suggested, between landing a series of painful blows to my head, that I should get some therapy, I decided that perhaps, after all…
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Animal Theory
The Home often careened into a panic-stricken, twelfth-century German village. Sister Superintendent Alfreda believed that all dogs were rabid and vicious, hence dog and “wolf” sightings were especial cause for pitchforks and torches, or so it seemed. Sisters Petra and Hademunda would herd us into a barn for a round of Hail Marys. Mr….
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Party of the Century
“Truman was more interested in Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust. He felt he had a great deal in common with the French writer. Both men had the eccentric work habit of writing while reclining in their small beds, both were fascinated by the behaviour of people in high society, and both, though gay,…
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Potholes
I waved across the college car park as my classmates got into their cars and drove away. A few offered me a lift, but I had already called a taxi. It was just after nine. The sun had been down for four hours already and a light rain was starting to harden into fine…
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Cunning Folk
I met Michelle on a new dating app whose CEO had recently migrated from a company that provided $99 pie graphs of their customers’ ancestral origins in exchange for vials of saliva mailed to their Salt Lake City lab. The Mormons had always been interested in identifying their pre-Mormon ancestors for posthumous baptism. I…
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Roman Holiday
I’d had no contact with my ex-husband Erwin for years, nor was I curious to find out what he was up to. But when an email from his wife arrived announcing his death, I was sent scrabbling around in my file cabinet in search of a stray newspaper clipping or photo to console her…
