I think of the man in the V for Vendetta maskdangling his legs off the roof of a drugstoreon Franklin Street. No one else seemed to see.My friends kept walking toward the restaurant,talking about tax breaks and single payers,and I told myself, advertising stunt, Halloween prankster, my imagination, and then moved oninto the monochrome safety…
Because the blinds stay open, I see birds. I watchmen watch those birds. Men monitoring flight pathsand a soaring hunger for the crumbs they shouldn’t’ve pocketed from chow. The indifferent birds ask for nothing,yearn for nothing, except perhaps the sky, which is nothingto them but magnetic blue wind—their one great war of journey. I’ve been…
Who is nothing, now, but a few fistfuls of ash. Not even that, since ashdissolves and is taken into the bodies of plants, or swept into the airon the wind. He’s so very fine he slips undetectedthrough a whale’s baleen, or a beetle’s gullet. He can even risethrough a stalk of grass with the upward…
If you forget me, remember the Italian icewe shared in Venice, leaning over a parapet.I believe it was sour apple. Now, you plucka single tulip from the pixelated blizzard,expecting from me, a Pavlovian response.In the absence of stimulus, my mind returnsto a paradisiacal state, where I am continuallypiqued, but not obligated to produce, or respond.There…
I remember the lure of seed, the outstretched hand begging me to nest beside him in bed during those first nights, the pecks, the treats, the ecstasy of new love swelling inside my breast right before everything changed. Some nights, it’s just once, a soft blow that stings for an instant, but doesn’t leave a mark. Some nights,…
It’s an art to suck the marrowfrom a bone, a womanwho lived through povertyonce said to me. My owndebt-to-income ratio drives meto drink, in the afternoon, andat night. The neon strobe lightsat our favorite club illuminateyour face, before it shuttersand closes off. In the end,happiness and meaningare irreconcilable differences,especially on the dance floor.I am passionate,…
He sits in the hallwayreading one of those magazinesabout famous military campaigns,all the grand deeds of valor and futility.He is a father, he is a son,jaws of a hungry animal.A storm passes to the west,cutting then restoring our slim cord of light.Hard rain on the pavement,heard but not seen.Zebra finches flicker in their cageat the…
In fiction, our winner is Anne de Marcken for her story “Foil.” Of her story, fiction judge Carmen Maria Machado said, “I couldn’t get enough of this story, its beauty and strangeness, the way it turned in on itself over and over again. So many moments and sentences quickened something inside me—gorgeous. I loved how…
Our daughter never puts her mind on displayLike a jewel too precious to own, or an animalToo wild to cage. At church she’s able to sit still,But then for weeks rattles off the names of poisonousSnakes and admonishes us that knowledge liesOnly outside of Creation. She stops playing in the yardBecause the tomatoes have turned…
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