Carol Hamilton
The young artist grabbed up
industrial castoffs, plastic-backed
chairs, built edifices
to tower or confine, but soon
Issue 15
Latest Reviews
Featured Interview
Newest Essay
How To Tell You What Restraint Means
Kelli Allen
Mirabi says elephants know the way
down each mountain. Valleys pass
in supplication under such feet.
Stilettos Can Wait by the Door
Kelli Allen
This will be a love letter after slipping
into, zipping fast, the tent. Calibrate how
gravity draws one feather over a bone.
Little Brother
About the Artist: Robert R. Thurman is an artist, musician, and poet. His work has appeared in such publications as Coldfront Magazine, 3:AM Magazine, Columbia Journal, Ars Medica: A Journal of Medicine the Arts and Humanities, Rune: The MIT Journal of Arts and Letters and Exquisite Corpse.
Excerpts from Brontosaurus Illustrated
Leanne Grabel
I ran into Lonni Britton in the Lucky’s parking lot a couple days after I got back to Stockton. Lonni was my best friend in seventh grade. She was also my idol.
Fool’s Gold
Fabia Oliveira
The women around me were wailing and cheering, and I thought about how when I grew up I would learn to worship as they did and delight in the Lord.
San Francisco Heart
Leah Mueller
If you deal with crazy people, you become crazy yourself. I should know. I have a degree in crazy, one of those life diplomas people talk about. I didn’t even know who my real father was until I was eighteen.
Dear India
Jade Sharma
When white people ask me where I’m from and I respond I was born here, and they still wait for an additional answer, I know they’re thinking: “REALLY, WHERE ARE YOU FROM?”
Molecules
Martin Willitts Jr.
Light is not lush, or mute,
not even a combination of ghosts
rising from carpet
as a funnel of dust motes,
Separation and Pulling Together and Separating
Martin Willitts Jr.
the body remembers what the mind forgets
withdraws from the world by inches
escalating exponentially
“but all is to be dared, because even a person of poverty…” (from Sappho’s Fragment 31, translated by Anne Carson)
S.D. Lishan
But all is to be dared, because even a person of poverty
wears a garland of longing.
I have painted my eyes and claws in scarlet.
My horse’s nostrils flare.
If You Forget Me (Response to Pablo Neruda’s Poem)
Diana Raab
I want you to know
one thing
if there is ever a day
when you begin to think
where I am in this world
and if I could live without you
(01) Amboy, AMERICAN ARTIST
Chris Kraus
As Paul Schimmel astutely observed to the writer of the Los Angeles Times August, 2006 Amboy obituary: “[T]he amalgam or juxtaposition of seemingly arbitrary elements, which Amboy was as adept at exploring and then quickly stockpiling, exemplifies the experience one might have while surfing the internet.”
The Label Maker
Deepinder Mayell
The trigger felt cold against Shiv’s finger. A strange sensation considering he had been palming the plastic label-maker for the better part of the morning.
Orange Dream: Story of a Dream Embedded Within Five Different Strata
Xavier Queipo
Translated by Jacob Rogers
I
Stillness
In the beginning everything was orange. Orange like the texture of silk, like an orange vein in every possible hue of orange. What I mean is: an orange cloud, an orange magma, an orange gel, an orange sensation.
Life in a Bottle
Emily Zasada
It was late on a Wednesday night when Francis—exhausted, and feeling chewed up from a day of long pointless meetings—saw the Life in a BottleTM floating just outside her office window.
Habanaíso, Valparabana
Yoss
Translated by George Henson
What? No, Gilda, you don’t have to roll the window up … The wind isn’t bothering me. And don’t make that pouty little-girl face; it has nothing to do with pride or stupid machismo. Yes, my eyes are watering.
Chad, The Pony
M.W. Johnston
My first name is Bradley, but what I’ll do is shorten it, so that only my mother and father, when they call me, call me by that name. Two years ago, I was one of the ten thousand or so individuals who adopted a talking horse.
Don’t Worry, Mother
Rachel Ballenger
This morning I couldn’t get any writing done because of the great rape that was happening all around me. Across from the deck a squirrel thundered up a tree, a horny male on her tail. She leapt from the branches of one oak to another.
Natural Red
C.I. Nwodim
You chose the medical school with the anatomy lab on the fifth floor. Most of the other schools keep their bodies in the basement.
My Father’s Life
Pedro Ugarte
Translated by Alan Williams
I could not have known at the time, but that was to become the most important day of my life.
I had just come home from school and was leaving my bag in the kitchen, when from the end of the corridor emerged my father’s deep, low voice.