James Appleby

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.

Karen Greenbaum-Maya

Karen Greenbaum-Maya

You can’t say he failed to choose a path in life, failed to make the sacrifice of choosing because there was nothing for him to choose at that time.

Golda Grais

Golda Grais

I took my nails into my thighs and smiled. I looked at your hands on the steering / wheel, drumming. I willed them to swerve us all into a tragedy tasting of concrete. / I suddenly saw myself in another ten years, still sitting there, humming.

Alexander Booth

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

Richard Siken

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.

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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.

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. 

Melody Wilson

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

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.

Golda Grais

I took my nails into my thighs and smiled. I looked at your hands on the steering / wheel, drumming. I willed them to swerve us all into a tragedy tasting of concrete. / I suddenly saw myself in another ten years, still sitting there, humming.

Bryan D. Price

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

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

Siegfried Mortkowitz

Because he wanted all the attention at the funeral, all the condolences, all the pity. The big man in sorrow. Jakob weeping.

Arthur Eloesser

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

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