reading on the couch, your messy hairfinally beginning to gray. You arebreathing, moving moleculesof air aside, inhabitingspace that could go emptyso easily. You holda heating pad to your sidewhere I bruised your rib, clumsyin my hunger for your infinitevariety. ya’aburnee,lovers say in Arabic—you bury me.It’s quiet enoughthat I can hear the ringing alwaysin the background…
You know how lightning never lasts long enoughto get a good look at it? and your eyes do this thing,as if they could grow larger, widen out of your facetrying to see enough,longer, more— this happens also when the heron passes: too quickly.Today I lucked into seeing how richly blueare the tops of his wing-feathers….
translated by Salar Abdoh If on a January day you should get in your car and start driving on the steep Chalus road toward the sea, you will at last come upon a place near the dome formations where you’ll see a stone, a smallish slab of rock with the flat, written part facing you:…
Book Recommendations from Our Former Guest Editors Ann Beattie recommends Movie Stars by Jack Pendarvis (Dzanc Books, 2016). “The humor, and the (forgive me) world view in these stories makes me think of Robert Plunket. No one else would conclude a story with the dog looking out the window, ‘white forepaws on the window ledge,…
What I got of worldly gumption I learned in the church of false assumption. Under the sentence of wrath and fire I studied the windows, the girls in the choir.
New Work by Former Guest Editors Elizabeth Spires, A Memory of the Future, poems (W. W. Norton & Company, July 2018) Dan Wakefield (coeditor with Jerome Klinkowitz), Kurt Vonnegut Complete Stories (Seven Stories Press, 2017)
There are many things I look for in a story—a vivid character or place, a memorable situation, a new way of seeing something. I like to be pulled in for a ride where I’m not quite sure where I’m going but feel confident that the driver does know and will indeed deliver me to the…
It was barely daylight when she left him on the porch. Hearing her stir, he’d gotten up, followed her around the house, his hair a mess, his eyes sunken, sleep-deprived. “Mama,” he said to her, a thing she relished, because up until Charles went to prison, he never called her this. “What’s that?” she said….
for Dr. NCB I’ve known rivers: Ancient, dusky rivers. —from “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” Langston Hughes She took her time, walking like a fawn, careful not to make a twig snap. It was getting dark, but she could still see plenty. The voice grew and rose, and was the color of mint, like what…
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