By Laura Bernstein-Machlay
inevitable as poltergeists
in these old buildings
that go on existing despite gravity and entropy
and spontaneous combustion.
bugged
read more
Issue 5
Latest Reviews
Featured Interview
Newest Essay
Freezer Theater. 1981
By Laura Bernstein-Machlay
On Cass, I think. Maybe 2nd
beside a boarded-up liquor store.
Underage us nuzzling each
a bottle of fizzy alcoholic something,
One History of Water
By Mary Carroll-Hackett
involves pilgrims, not the hand-turkey kind, not the brass-buckled blind bulletin board thieves, but travelers, proselytes, seekers, willing to walk over grassy plains, dry for more than thirty years with scant rain, drought forcing out this parade of the thirsty, stumbling due east across the Altiplano toward the blue white peaks of the Andes.
Dirty Feet
By Mary Carroll-Hackett
and dirty fingernails, angels, ten thousand of them, living in trailers, canned angels, holy meat, languishing in the Carolina heat, driving up from Kinston, and Shelby, and Bear Grass, and Calico, driving in the vans they bought second hand at Car Coop, headed to the ocean, to Buxton, to Avon, to Duck, for a day, for a week, seeking some sun, and some water.
The Visible Woman
By Mary Carroll-Hackett
As a child, she could make herself invisible, so wrapped she was in dreams of angels in the trees, and aliens in the cornfield, and becoming Houdini, tied up in sheets she shook free from the bed, begging her brother to bind her hands and feet, so she could show him how they would escape.
Nothing of now has a future except
By Kathleen Jesme
Nothing of now has a future except in memory where it is washed, pressed,
hung and stored, first in the front closet and then, when that show
has closed, further and further back, so that over time
The border was right
By Kathleen Jesme
The border was right there a river
another source a permeable frontier one without walls
a stone’s throw to a different country although I never threw
Tonight
By Aaron Shurin
Tonight he is here, surrounded by wreaths of smoke, or he is a coil of smoke on the edge of dispersal, or I am a smoke machine and he is mine…
Orchid and Butterfly
By Nels Hanson
I’ve read that every human family has
a smell but prefers the odors of other
families to its own. One butterfly in
Two Rivers
By Nels Hanson
Nights, warm still summer Valley dark
unlit by wary farmers’ mercury lamps
touched so easily, supple second skin
Barreling Over Can-Do Rooms’ Thresholds
By Gerard Sarnat
i. I dwell in an empty chair fantasy behind a barren desktop
except for vacant page after page on which nothing is unwritten.
After a good night kiss on my cot, I’d wish Father might leave the door
I Could See…
By Aaron Shurin
I could see calcium going up against the wind, from my desk at my bedroom window as the typewriter clacked like bones… “Bones,” it wrote, “I sound like bones.”
Cringeworthy Treacleland Venture
By Gerard Sarnat
A doc who ministers
to Silicon Valley and Stanford
outcasts,
A Life of Flowers
Padma Prasad is a writer and painter. Her fiction has appeared in Eclectica, The Looseleaf Tea, Reading Hour, ETA Journal, and The Boiler Journal. She blogs her poem drawings at padhma.wordpress.com. Her art is mostly figurative and can be viewed at fineartamerica.com. In her writing, she tries to capture stillness; in her painting, she tries to paint narratives. She lives in Northern Virginia and works as a federal contractor in records management.
On Special
By Nicola Waldron
We’re inside the old police station, just the two of us, in a room that might once have been a holding area. It’s the right size and shape for a cell. They’ve had to paint the wall, but you can still see the notches; the kicked-in bits.
My Brief Suspension of Judgment in the World of Bad Art
By Mara Naselli
At ArtPrize, the largest art competition in the world, a crowd had gathered just inside the DeVos Convention Center in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Karla
By Kent Monroe
The story we all know has God simply resting on the seventh day, but in my story he spends that day adrift in melancholic contemplation, tracing the face of the Girl Who Killed Her Family on a glowing nebula. Then he weeps inconsolably. Then he vanishes inside a photon and lets it all be.
Declension
By Nicholas Alexander Hayes
Clumps of wet snow mat the black collar of my houndstooth coat. I clomp my red galoshes in front of the West Campus’s foyer. Gray slush splatters. It stains the coat’s white and black pattern.
The Edge of the Abyss
By Fernando Vallejo
Translated by Laia García Sánchez & Robert Jackson
When they opened the door for him, he entered without saying hello, went upstairs, crossed the second floor, got to the room in the back, collapsed on the bed and fell into a coma. Like that, free of himself, at the edge of the abyss of death that he would fall over not long afterwards, he spent what I believe were his only days in peace since his long-ago youth.
Miley Cyrus: Blood & Guts
By Rachel Nagelberg
Miley Cyrus sits cross-legged on the floor of her hotel bedroom, hands resting loosely in her lap, eyes shut to the pulsating exterior world. She is breathing in only with her nostrils, focusing intently on deeper work within.
Rosenberry
By Steve Weiner
Rosenberry was a bed and breakfast bungalow where Highway 52 came to Wausau in central Wisconsin. It was owned by the late Judge Rosenberry, who engineered the five-day workweek.
Ask the Hydrangea
By Michael Shou-Yung Shum
I prefer not to show the ocean how I feel deep down. I am very comfortable being close to boulders. Just when the sun starts to get close to me I find myself pulling away.
Bluebird En Abyme
By Daniel J. Pizappi
The damage wasn’t visible from the street. Sitting on the cool grass, staring back at the house, you might not even know it had happened. This would prove frustrating for the photographers and camera crews.
39 Hours
By Kyle Hemmings
At night, the city could squeeze him, smother him in a dumb-box, make him believe that marionettes could come to life in mirrors. The city was 39 stories of dead moths with neon wings. The city was masked people trapped inside stucco. Or a basement apartment with a ceiling painted with stars.
Alibi
By Eugene Lim
I went at the regular time to the karaoke bar to meet Muriel and Gus. The bar, which had several names but usually went by “Alibi,” took up the entire ninth floor of a hastily built structure amidst the dirty neon of one of Diaspora City’s seedier districts.
The Elephant
By Marianne Villanueva
The elephant’s hide was a beautiful, dark grey. It was a young female: little more than a baby. Zoo officials paid a small fortune to have it shipped from Thailand.
The captain in charge of the cargo had never before transported an exotic. But he was an excellent captain. The shipping line had absolute confidence in his abilities.