By Sierra-Nicole Qualles
Honey, I must have run out of ideas when I spent the night on the balcony. Two dogs below wanted me to jump down to them — spend some time and have a drink in the gutter. I told them no and that I was waiting for a ghost’s head to put my hands on.
By Michael du Plessis
A Novel in Thirteen Chapters
I
The jeweler’s heart burns only for the icy brilliance of the gems he facets, while east and west eunuchs with the guile of serpents establish swelling bureaucracies almost certain to clog the arteries of empire. Since the village has fallen under a spell, the full moon never wanes and gallops each night across the sky in a coach of clouds.
By Kirsten Kaschock
“Forget the pitch.” The words woke with him. Had it been a ship dream? A dream of torches and townspeople? A baseball dream? He’d had them all. Dreaming was the place he did stuff. His bad hips were worse.
By Chris Yamashita
Here they were, staring at the smoldering, blackened smile of an extinguished house fire. Tendrils of smoke rose from the seething ground, ash swirled in the air, and Reid’s wife, Waverly, said, “I can’t believe this,” which was her new favorite thing to say. She couldn’t believe much of anything anymore — for instance, Reid having forgotten to buy carrots for the stir-fry last night.
By Sammy Greenspan
of sudden knowledge — you’re not dead after all —
but here among us, we the living, reading poems
into the night in a little café by the sea.
I turn to a friend: My god, Karen’s still alive after all,
but he tells me No, she’s dead, tilts his head
By David Bajo
Prima X — Equisa — honors her cousin’s request and scatters his ashes over the caldera of Paricutín. The wind is perfect, swirling lightly around the volcano’s lip, taking him in a procession of dust devils down the inside slope and over the green lake at the bottom.
By Geraldine Connolly
Once I rode a one-eyed horse
To a tree house in the forest.
Once I was a child spreading
Tomorrow’s clean clothes
By Bryce Emley
Sometimes one feels the need of ordinary things
— Charles Wright
Sometimes a filled glass makes thirst exist,
By Bryce Emley
Having never met, this is what I’ve observed of you: you are not who you are, but a slant-rhymed chorus, a shared moment in a nightclub that doesn’t exist, a set of perfect bangs draped like a walrus fin across a Photoshopped forehead.
By Peter Burzynski
Yesterday, I breathed in
and spit out metropolis.
Each braided glob
of fermented poutine
By Sven Hansen-Löve
Translated by Simon Rogghe
April was having a strange dream. She saw herself wandering through a vast hotel. The occupants had all cleared out due to some catastrophe or other. She explored the rooms, rummaged through people’s belongings and opened their suitcases one by one, looking for something specific… what, she couldn’t say.
By Christopher Kondrich
The past springs out of its helix and so overwhelms me
that I can hardly carve our names in water, which checks
itself for messages to deliver to the clouds.
By Christopher Kondrich
Running over affinities and the brittle — so close to little
that it’s dust — sheets of falling paper, I have a kind of conviction
measured in stichs, which, if we all go to our bibles, are empty
as a foot is empty until feet fill it,
By John Beckman
At the age of nine, in the year before my mother’s death, I had become exceedingly religious. My mother tutored me daily in catechism, and since my father and sister had never cared for religion (they spent their Sundays together at the beach), it became a sort of game between us — the litany, the Novenas, the Lives of the Saints.
By Racquel Goodison
ONE.
It is a dance she did every evening, but this time she hoped she would not be locked in the broken waltz, draped over its enduring grip, circling till dawn.
Jason Trbovich is an aspiring photographer based in Houston, TX. You can follow him on Flickr. If you would like to contact Jason feel free to send him an email at jasontrbovich@yahoo.com. View more of his work at www.realcowboysdrivecadillacs.com.
By R. Zamora Linmark
Monday, June 13, 2011
2:05 a.m. Jet-lag-inspired tosses and turns. Entire building is moaning to Adele, Rihanna, Lady Gaga.
Nth attempt to get past Jacques Jouet’s: “At this point, the story will follow some paths that may appear whimsical on the surface.”
By Karen An-hwei Lee
1.
For the last orange tree, a masquerade of a dozen myths —
On the corner of Iglesia Oasis de Gloria, out of a coastal mesa where the freeway ends at a beach city, in a soft albedo of hidden southern California suns
By Monica Macansantos
We didn’t know about them until the early 1990s, just as I was entering school. “Comfort Women,” as soldiers of the Japanese Imperial Army once called them, were women abducted from their homes in countries occupied by the Japanese during the Second World War, held against their will, and turned into the army’s sex slaves.