Siegfried Mortkowitz

Siegfried Mortkowitz

There was nothing I could have done / about the life I was born into. / It was waiting for me, and I slipped into it / like a man waking up in a dream. 

Nia Crawford

Nia Crawford

My sister bought me a “Sucka Free” hoodie in the ‘80s when Yo! MTV Raps was hot. I wore that shirt till the hole under the right arm couldn’t be mended anymore. That was 1999, ten years after Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince won the inaugural Best Rap Performance Grammy. At that time, I really believed I was sucka free …

John Frame

John Frame

Geoffrey pulls his hand from his pocket and withdraws the four-inch handle of a switchblade knife. Jason’s face turns ghostly. The American yells and runs out the door, causing his friend to follow. Most of the others never saw what Geoffrey showed the White man, although they laugh at the commotion it causes and applaud the result.

Andrew Christoforakis

Andrew Christoforakis

Even the curve of a conch shell / goes forever inward to an ending / too small for us to see. I put my ear / to it and hear Do not disturb my circles

Melody Wilson

Melody Wilson

My mother / paid for groceries one dollar bill / at a time. When I left home // she lost a third of her aid.

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Read the Spring Issue

Justin Quinn

Because we like flowers close to us we hold them / a little longer than their natural cycles. / See these four-hundred-year-old honeysuckles /
in Herrick’s poems. How his rhymes enfold them.

Kenton K. Yee

An old man has been blocking my view. / Get out! I shout. He shouts it back. // I open my mouth. He inspects my teeth, / ducks out of view.

James Appleby

I know my neighbours by their walk. / Our walls are thin. A sort of string / between two cans, our stack of floors. / I hold it to my ear. It sings.

Nuala Watt

Is this the murderer, or the wee nyaff / that kicks the hippocampus when I’m tired? / And should I yell or let it wander off, / my crisis just a detail on the ward / that nobody will log, unless I call?

Annie Brechin

Such an itch you are  / man I don’t quite know  // all the things you might say / if we were on your terrace / with a beer 

Amy Madson

No one knows how much the silverware drawer matters. It rattles in Leah’s mind if it’s left unorganized. She checks it often.

Bryan D. Price

You say utterance is when word becomes law, is held or holds itself in the air like an accident of heaven.

Wendy Wisner

When I told my mother she has dementia, / she said that of course she’d get dementia / because her mom had Alzheimer’s but //

Vaishnavi Pusapati

there is no time for tears, there never is; / no time for breathing deep. / A fit of sadness is like pulling a door

Kenton K. Yee

An old man has been blocking my view. / Get out! I shout. He shouts it back. // I open my mouth. He inspects my

Ramsey Jester

The big one was launched at dawn. Doesn’t matter / who sent it. Soon there will be others, / enough missiles to blanket the sky.

John Pring Poet

John Pring

I know this silence / by heart, willed stillness, rotten // moon pulling itself through / the cavity of window.

Amy Madson

No one knows how much the silverware drawer matters. It rattles in Leah’s mind if it’s left unorganized. She checks it often.

Katarína Kucbelová

He didn’t recognize me, or else pretended not to see me. A neighbour who doesn’t say hello. I’m a neighbour who is see-through, perhaps completely invisible, not

Nia Crawford

My sister bought me a “Sucka Free” hoodie in the ‘80s when Yo! MTV Raps was hot. I wore that shirt till the hole under

John Frame

Geoffrey pulls his hand from his pocket and withdraws the four-inch handle of a switchblade knife. Jason’s face turns ghostly. The American yells and runs

Diána Vonnák

Horror stares back at me surreptitiously from every corner of the flat with wide-open cats’ eyes. The reflexes I had of old have become alien

John Oliver Hodges

He is not our first dead tourist. We have had copter incidents, people cutting legs on ice, avalanche victims. One lady fell down a mine

Siegfried Mortkowitz

SEX AND THE HOLOCAUST   I’ve been masturbating for as long as I can remember. Sometimes it seems that I came out of the womb

Paul Hostovsky: Pitching for the Apostates | Book Review

Hostovsky’s fondness for words and keen ear for spoken language benefit his writing: he can record and create dialogue in a brilliant and natural way. In this respect, he has more in common with short-story writers than with most contemporary poets, who tend to avoid direct speech.

Books in Brief

Eight recent volumes of poetry, prose, and photography, reviewed by our editors

Interview with Artist Scott Kiernan

B O D Y interviews Scott Kiernan, a New York-based artist whose video, photo and installation works interact in ways that address their own materiality and means of distribution.

Interview with Artist Anna Hawkins

Anna Hawkins is an artist who works primarily in moving image and installation with an interest in the ways that images, gestures and language are circulated and transformed online and the impacts of technology on the intimate spheres of daily life.

Interview with Artist Johanna Strobel

Weaving together disparate references spanning across histories and geographies, German interdisciplinary artist Johanna Strobel explores the entanglement between philosophy, semiotics, and actuality.

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