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.

Diána Vonnák

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 to me. They tempt me to provoke her, but thankfully I’m still paralysed and the only way I can wind her up is by staring at her neck.

Ondřej Macl

Ondřej Macl

If our parents were here, they would already have sent us to bed. / And once again, I wouldn’t notice that it’s my younger brother / with whom I’m having the longest relationship of my life.

Lisa Higgs

Lisa Higgs

The big story is the old dog dying slowly, / half her mouth working tender bits / she is hand fed, strokes or tumor / or both, unsettling her stomach. / The big story, her good days, little one / her bad.

Brian Johnson

Brian Johnson

I dreamt kindness to animals was widespread, / Their demand on our powers greater and still greater. // If a rope broke, we released the herd. / If a drop of rain fell, we unveiled a flock of birds.

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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.

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 

Alexander Booth

no one cared, not then, not now, still what got lost & when, on the snowy side of a street, cold buildings cold book in hand inscribed in colored pencil no myth but those imagined & those at best misunderstood

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.

Richard Siken

A dog bites down on a stick of dynamite and takes off running. They are going to explode together. Imagine: making someone feel like that, making them lose their mind like that.

Tereza Riedlbauchova

Tereza Riedlbauchová

And in the end we are happy only when everything pauses,
and the fullness of the world fits
into the flutter of a curtain in

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.

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

Arthur Eloesser

  CITIES AND CITY PEOPLE   (an excerpt)     Cities and City People: Berlin, 1919 Essays by Arthur Eloesser Translated from the German by

Diane Simmons

Diane Simmons

There must be thousands of us non-Southerners with similar secret histories, people who profited from the crime of slavery and continue to do so.

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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