Box 2007 graphite, colored pencil and gouache 75 x 56cm (29 1/2 x 22 inches)
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Issue 17
Latest Reviews
Featured Interview
Newest Essay
slim shadows
By Ulrike Almut Sandig
Translated by Jari Niesner
of the shimmer of the trees in the light I won’t
say anything, nor of the trees in themselves.
no word of the beech tree in the backyard of the doctor
whose daughter dies in the bedroom, no word
Maybe This is Why I Subject You to Danger
By Alex Rieser
At that area of the zoo where they keep the elephants
He’s spinning his little body
Around the base of three umbrellas
On the bench across
Exile Camp
By Diego Valeri
Translated by Laura Valeri
Beaten, uprooted trees are we
upright but smothered, and this miserly land
that carries us is not our land.
Around us, the rock blows enemy
Spider
By Geraldine Connolly
The one who swings the black star
of its body across the pane,
the one who keeps hanging its
Cinder
By Geraldine Connolly
Bitter ash your voice, like a cinder
your voice like a motor, revving
and roaring and whining, still.
When you were young and penniless,
The Unblazed Trail of Praise
By Bob Elmendorf
I’ve never seen the prairie. It must start
soon out of Buffalo, the farthest I’ve been west,
under whose streets Lake Erie, sharing shores
with Canada, flattens its sheet.
When I Was a Child in the 1980s
By Zach Wyner
When I was a child in the 1980s, I vaguely understood some things and acutely understood others. I vaguely understood the big things that I was supposed to fear, like drugs, The Soviet Union, gang violence, and killer bees.
On Vision
By Lily Hoang
When I was ten, I drowned in the ocean. Decades have changed the curvature of my trauma from fear to repulsion. Human sweat disgusts me.
Highway-Girl
By Jillian McManemin
I zipped out of the city and merged onto a tree-lined highway heading upstate. This road led to the manicured, precious towns of the Hudson Valley. Rehabilitation centers hid in the Palisades.
The Flash Flood
By Curt Saltzman
The three boys leaned against the chain-link fence above the dry wash. There was Johnny and Tom and another boy who’d wanted to tag along. The day was hot and they felt the heat like a weight pushing down on them.
Commencement
By Jason Hamilton
Something happens when you reach a certain age without having children. You become the guy who should have kids but doesn’t.
Images
By Michael Agugom
He wanted to outsmart himself. He stood before the mirror and waited. His reflection in the mirror also waited. He wanted to prove to his other-self in the mirror that he was an island boy, a boy from the creeks.
Crumbs Market
By Ihsan Abdel Quddous
Translated from Nabeel M. Yaseen
I am a Palestinian refugee. The word refugee evokes struggle, strife, injured dignity, pride, and the fight to liberate the Arab world from the yoke of occupation.
Cruel Summer
By Nicole Mestre
My stepmother grabbed the car’s rusty window handle and spun it around once. From the backseat of my dad’s mustard-yellow Hornet, I watched the glass creak down two inches before getting stuck. Her head bobbed back and forth as she tried to force the handle back around.
Mutual Consent: Excerpt from Diary of a Lonely Girl
By Miriam Karpilov
Translated by Jessica Kirzane
In the middle of my quiet, bitter cry, in the lonely silence of that strange house, I heard a quiet knock on my door. I shook myself awake and covered my head with a pillow to dampen the noise, but the stubborn knocking did not let up.
Harlow Postcards
By Stephanie Dickinson
Los Angeles sits, watching, in that green slow way swamps have. Behind her blonde hair (tinted the same as mine) and complexion that color has died in, there’s marshy bog, iron and stone.
Relapse
By M.C. Zendejas
I. WINTER
He’d asked two people before finding a guy. The whole time he kept saying it was just to relax after a long day at work. That this wasn’t a normal thing for him. The guy didn’t really seem to be listening.
Hare: An Excerpt from Ire Land
By Elisabeth Sheffield
Have ye no other kin ye can turn to?What a question, coming from you, Madmaeve. Didn’t you write in your blog, just a month or so ago, before you left home, about the familial prison#?
The Brevity of Cigarettes
By John Better Armella
Translated by George Bert Henson
Whether it’s a transvestite taking a drag on her damp Pielroja on some corner of barrio Santa Fe, a middle manager asking with feigned dignity, “Marlboro, please,” or a precocious little girl smoking her punk brother’s butts in secret, cigarettes possess the brevity necessary to tell a story, not in the style of Jim Jarmusch, where they accompany an espresso, and the black-and-white screen accentuates a bitter encounter between Tom Waits and Iggy Pop.
Sunglasses
By Laurie Stone
I was walking in a forest along a leaf-strewn path. The moon glowed yellow, and I could see my outline. I was seeing myself from the perspective of the moon.