Herewith, we present you our Fall Issue, a wonderful harvest of poems, short stories, novel excerpts, interviews, and reviews from the many hundreds of submissions we’ve received. Check back daily throughout November for great new writing selected by our editors.
Herewith, we present you our Fall Issue, a wonderful harvest of poems, short stories, novel excerpts, interviews, and reviews from the many hundreds of submissions we’ve received. Check back daily throughout November for great new writing selected by our editors.
Eight recent volumes of poetry, prose, and photography, reviewed by our editors
My body opens like a highway sinkhole. It’s a baby someone shouts and I know they are wrong. It’s a baby I shout, still wrong.
We each have a role. I am the storyteller. She is the muse. She’s Romanian. She looks like a Gypsy. A beautiful Gypsy. She says that if it gave her more cachet in the academic world, she’d gladly say she’s a Gypsy.
We’ve worked / for this / intimacy—
/ me, letting go / of my need / to know, // you, trusting me / to let you / be.
Why do they want to see pictures / of what they looked away from / in disgust?
Weaving together disparate references spanning across histories and geographies, German interdisciplinary artist Johanna Strobel explores the entanglement between philosophy, semiotics, and actuality.
People never want to leave the party, do they? Drinks full, lips / red, lies told to the point of truth. We’re waiting out the silence.
Everything seemed set for the trip to the Moon when the prudent Krutohlav, still lost in contemplation of the whole enterprise, imagined yet more problems that stood in his way.
I’m a fair sacrifice. Steel tools pass in and out of me / like parishioners through the threshold / of a heavy door. My flesh holds too much / that I cannot see.
The street was quiet. A dog pissed on my motorbike chain / & I waved away the smell with my hand. / I got home, I gathered up my cat Zelda, / we listened to Leonard Cohen “One of Us Cannot Be Wrong” …
Jane always drove a little drunk. She was a really good drunk driver and insisted she’s even better at driving when a little drunk. I wasn’t worried — she’s never been caught or close to an accident. But tonight she was off.
this toddler toddles up to my table / and says Hi over and over, like fifty times, / or maybe he’s saying high because honestly / he’s behaving like a meth head who just got / out of a mental hospital
I asked her if it was strange that sometimes he’d rub and stroke my almost sunburned unshirted shoulders, tousle my hair, offer me a drag off his smoke, and then tell me a dirty joke, or a story about eating pussy. I asked her if this was something that should concern me.
two children are rolling side by side / through images projected on the floor: // a train runs across the wheat field in Montmajour / onto their T-shirts
I google the name of the bird that is looking at me. / The black bird with red on its wing is called / the Red-winged Black Bird. / This has given me confidence in naming the rest.
From her earliest work — before the idea of eco-entanglement was widely adopted by poets — Arnold viewed nature not as an ‘object’ or ‘other’ but as an inextricable (and clearly endangered) system in which humanity participates.
We ate our youth from the knife. / Night fishing trips, moonlit dates, / and you, a jug-eared hero, / burnt yourself with naked girls’ flesh, / like with hot fish soup.
An elderly ex colonel walking stiffly past me in the opposite direction takes the time to come carefully to a halt and explain to me how hundreds of years ago the villagers here destroyed the fish trap a landowner had built upriver to stop their supply of free fish.
October 25, 1917 and the place is Petrograd, Russia, / and the horse pulling my stagecoach is whipped / mercilessly all the way to the Mariinsky Theater
He was my best friend in 2nd grade / and 3rd grade and maybe 4th grade too. I don’t remember / when it happened exactly, but he had a sledding accident / at the bottom of that hill
I will never entirely approve of the Frenchmen I meet, because they will never be the true Frenchman I apprehended in childhood.
I’m adorably playful while he never says / anything about my own womanly tush / (because he’s not insane) or my clothes or tits.
We are in bed talking about Queen Elizabeth’s death / and the ascendance of Charles to the throne. / “They should have made me king,” I say. / “You?” she says. “You’re too lazy to be king.”
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