The air is full of smoke due to regional wildfires…Call 911 only if you see active fire or have structure fire —Austin Police Department The city smells of smoke though i’m toldThe fire’s elsewhere. the fire’s always elsewhere,Until you can see it, then you’re runningToward it or more likely, away. untoward, i know,The coward in…
[M]odern man no longer communicates with the madman […] There is no common language: or rather, it no longer exists; the constitution of madness as mental illness, at the end of the eighteenth century, bears witness to a rupture in a dialogue, gives the separation as already enacted, and expels from the memory all those…
for Brian Higgins, d. 2015 However slivered, however occluded, however brindled the lightyou shined in your walks from building to building all these years,on sidewalks forking the city, or across the violet harbor of the suburbs;however vertigo’d my own vantage point—or myopic my abilityto see a lighthouse light its way through mist: I know that…
At 2 a.m., the dog nosed up a robin on the pavement beside my car. Itwas less than a fledgling, and the nest was high above us in a parkinglot paper birch, its fist of twigs and threaded trash plain in the Augustlamplight. It wasn’t clear whether the bird had fallen or been nudgedout by…
I have been dying under these Connecticut stars all my life, relentlessly,even though the sky is different above Buenos Aires and Lusaka, eventhough the Magellanic Clouds float like blossoms of dust and couldbe seen for the price of a plane ticket. In fairness, I have Sirius andVega and Aldebaran. In fact, most of the brightest…
The anniversary of some future sadness passes every day unnoticed.The calendars bear no trace of it; the candles stay in their box. Inevery house, there’s a dead mouse in the wall that the living micebuild their nest beside. Meanwhile, it’s the usual programs aimed atthe sagging couch.
When she arrived at Grisha’s, Marina heard the fierce sound of clanging cookware. This meant Aneta was angry. These days, Aneta was always angry. To hear her tell it, she hated being a home attendant, detested old people and their smell, found Grisha a dissolute lecher and couldn’t stand dirty Brooklyn sidewalks. Their employer, VIP…
It took three weeks for Gwaza to disintegrate. Even after he was gone, his smell carried in a thick veil of flies, keeping the house door shut and all the windows closed. People walking by on their way to Church carrying gossip, or back from work with roadside onions and Friday night Chicken Licken stopped…
In fiction, our winner is Lydia Martín for her story “The Adjustment Act.” The fiction judge, Anthony Marra, writes, “‘The Adjustment Act’ is a flat-out triumph: richly characterized, gorgeously rendered, deeply humane. Aside from the author’s obvious talents, I was moved and impressed by the story’s focus on the humanitarian price of ideological conviction. Politics,…
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