By Cliff Tisdell
Oil on canvas, 30 in x 30 in. Based on the Jenga Tower on Leonard Street, NYC.
NYC Skyscraper 2024
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Issue 32
Latest Reviews
Featured Interview
Newest Essay
The Temperance of Heretics
By Steve Barbaro
“The smokecrazed horizonface. Life beyond the life of each last belief-inebriated beach?”
The maintenance manager
By DS Maolalai
“the burn and the tan, the bruise
and the beautiful tuesdays outside. circling
housing estates, like a dog taming tick-
bitten sheep. I’m driving—it’s boiling,”
People in free situations.
By DS Maolalai
“look: we’re pushing
out onward –
fast over motorways
like opening a book”
Selected Dates (1998)
By Shawna Yang Ryan
“The Librarian asked to share a table with me at a crowded café where I was writing a paper. He balanced a wooden salad bowl in one hand and a library copy of Blood Meridian in the other.”
Black Man’s Guide to Bookselling / Snap Shot #46
By Jerry Thompson
“Baby on the way… In this city of red eyes and milk-soaked men, the sky beneath Georgia Boulevard drips onto the disciples of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, clawing away the easy markings that cut the chase into tiny conversations behind the counter of TV repair shops lining the block beside me.”
Excerpt from The Confusion of Figure and Ground
By Mary Burger
“I came into possession of the apartment in the way these things typically happen, which is to say, someone died. I was the person deemed by the court, and, if she’d thought about it, perhaps also by her, to serve as her estate executor.”
The Blue Plastic Basin
By Eric T. Racher
“Lying just then on the bed well not bed really not thinking of anything thinking nothing of skin of the heaviness of days of dead starling or grackle not sure which not thinking of the matted old grey longhair who had placed it so lovingly on the welcome mat”
Ode to Sending Light
By Mehrnoosh Torbatnejad
“It’s the impossibility of the well
wish that gives me pause
like, how do you even send light,
loop ribbons around shapeless glow”
Report to Marianne
By Mark J. Mitchell
“The news is bad—when angels left
they blocked them all by dropping wings.
Some have looked for old paths around.
No one’s seen them since. There’s a song”
Tabs
By Austin Adams
“The revealed and ultimate truth began, as all things do, on the internet.
James, who’s changing his name to Rick, read that neuroscientists at Cal-Tech— ‘Western,’ Pam corrects.”
Xiaolongbao, My Love
By Karen An-hwei Lee
“As far as I can recall, my first dream in the plague of absentia was not about soup dumplings but simply about wastefulness. In a long waiting room, men and women in lab coats stood before a porcelain gullet, smooth as a swan’s throat.”
An Impasse
By Ian MacClayn
“When the radiance of an epiphany looks into every culpable flaw of your heart, it will not feel heroic or divine. Things long dormant within us grope for growth and all struggle to breathe.”
Clotheslines
By Khalil AbuSharekh
“In our household, clotheslines were a constant source of conflict. Sometimes, my mom asked me to fix them and make them more organized. Other times, they stirred up arguments with my father, leading him to take out his frustration on us, often ending in a beating.”
Mooring
By Kirsten Kaschock
“You are living and I keep you in one still piece alive.
On the ice, everything held quiet, and after—
marks from knives we wore on our feet.”
Requiem for the Golden City
By Molara Wood
“In the end, it was the mining belt that spat him out. But he hadn’t the tiniest intimation of this when he set out that evening, thinking only that he hated short-time.”
My Voice Will Not Be My Own
By Vincenzo della Malva
“As William was checking his guise in the mirror and putting on the finishing touches, he slipped a toothache candy down his throat. Oh, aren’t we all under the pressures of cares and sorrows?”