Read More: A brief Q&A with Garrett Ashley When given the option to either crush the murderer’s head with a rock or drown him in the river, I chose to drown him in the river. The decision had something to do with being in nature. Hearing the water running gently over the stones seemed like […]
Read More: A brief Q&A with James Ulmer I. The glass doors parted in front of him as he approached, and Professor Tristan Dietrich stepped into the brightly lit interior of the Walmart Superstore. He glanced up to the right to observe his own ghostly image, flickering and faint, in the monitor of the store’s […]
Read More: A brief Q&A with Alexis Kruckeberg Green Onions A short glass with root ends of green onions is our center piece. They are on the baked potatoes on our plates, and the green is under more than one of my fingernails. You think it’s silly to keep re-growing them this way. I wouldn’t […]
“The Narrative Soliloquizes (I and II)” and “Your Dead Fairymother” by Indrani Sengupta appeared in Issue 31 and can be read here. We’d love to hear about “the Narrative soliloquizes” and “the Narrative soliloquizes (2).” I’d been working on a cycle of fairy tale character poems where the speakers “come awake” and interrogate the construction and […]
Read More: A brief Q&A with Indrani Sengupta the Narrative soliloquizes forgive me. I variegated the tulips. I sliced the wedding train and swans commenced out from the eider. they ate some children and not others, and no one could tell why. forgive me I could not tell why. where there was bread, I did […]
MARCH It comes stealthily at first. A handful of deaths in a nursing home somewhere near Seattle. A woman and a man traveling from Wuhan on a plane. I make note of these isolated incidents, store them away in the part of my brain reserved for midnight worry. His body is soft and white as […]
Read More: A Brief Q&A with Caroline Chavatel This Fabulous Century IV I am never sure of the collective garment we sew—its askew buttons and misplaced hems. At six, my grandmother taught me the laws of the machine—knob, pedal, stitch, reverse stitch. She would let me choose the pattern, guide my hands to thread. I […]
Read More: A brief Q&A with Alethea Black STEP ONE Wake up drenched in sweat, with a fatigue that reaches to your marrow. Fear you’re dying. Go to the doctor. When he runs a battery of tests and declares you to be in perfect health, blink at him in wonderment. Explain again: everything hurts, you […]
Read More: A brief Q&A with Adam Houle In Service Bless this moment before the hydraulic door sighs open. Bless the tamped heel-click on the low-knap carpet. Bless the medicine cart its quiet wheels. Bless how it feels to watch your face attenuate as the glass levers inward. Bless its disappearance and the hall that […]
Read More: A brief Q&A with Stephen Akey I’m always mystified that people quote La Rochefoucauld’s maxim, “True love is like a ghost, which everybody talks about but few have seen,” as if it wittily encapsulated some worldly, unillusioned wisdom. It’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. Almost everybody falls in love. It doesn’t have […]