By Satoshi Iwai
I stole a giraffe from the public zoo and hid it in the kitchen of my apartment. The kitchen was so small that the giraffe had to stick its head out of the window.
Aquatic Giraffe
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Issue 9
Latest Reviews
Featured Interview
Newest Essay
The Eternals
By Chin-Sun Lee
From outside the house looked welcoming, if a bit run-down, and not quite to Claire’s taste. It was a small modernized Greek Revival with blistered white clapboard walls and gray shutters. Grass ran wild in the yard, patchy and thin in some parts and overgrown in others.
Group Study, 2012
Group Study, 2012 (graphite, color pencil and ink on paper,19.75 x 20 inches) is one of a series of drawings in conjunction with Alvarez’s film about high school, The Visitor Owl.
Rotten Love
By Satoshi Iwai
I love her like a pretty chick, but she dumps me like a rotten egg. She tells me that she is going to marry a young and rich anaconda. After her departure, I watch “Anaconda Mating” on YouTube.
Seven Colorless
By Satoshi Iwai
Don’t tell me anything about rainbows, because every rainbow belongs to someone else’s summer. All I have is one afternoon and seven cigarette burns on my bare stomach.
The House of Songs
By Adam Klein
The professor looked hopelessly at his bird. Sleeping!
How does it manage to sleep through such noise, he thought. The professor noted the tiny feathers, like hatch marks around its eyes, and the eyelids smooth as green crepe and closed with the finality of a theater curtain.
Disciples for the Locksmith
By Joe Baumann
When I opened the door and found a naked man facedown on the front porch, I assumed he was a drunk. But then he stretched up, extending his arms so his back curved like he was a seal, and he smiled at me.
That Absolute Darkness, the Hell for Fools
By Diane Payne
For no obvious reason, I simply wake, then realize I haven’t a clue where I am. It’s so damn dark. I sit up and feel my heart pounding.
Letterform
By Jessica Murray
To drive north, alone, toward the ghost
of the Laurentide Icesheet retreating
through boreal forests, the long miles
spending themselves
Open Water
By Morgan Christie
You never met him; he died before you were born. Two bullets to the chest, one to the head, and one to the neck, it was a bloody mess. When your mother was called in to identify the body, she fainted. You were due in fifty-nine days, but she went into early labor.
Animalia
By Wilfredo Pascual
1.
One night in 1979, my father saw a bat inside the bedroom. My young parents turned thirty that year and I was twelve, the oldest of three children.
Word from You
By Theodore Worozbyt
stepped onto the sloop Velveteen, where nightly
coffee rounds gray into buttered wood
and the glares are both less and more
accurate than the sum of my fingerprint:
Trashed
By Harry McEwan
Ipassed you on the street this morning. I was dashing to work, texting my boss, late, as usual. I didn’t recognize you until after I’d passed. When the realization hit me, I stopped dead a half block later and looked back. At first I wasn’t sure.
Punch and Judy Puppets for Sale
By Evan Hansen
Birds silently froth the hills
In a dream or film about how
Life is beautiful in some near
Elsewhere. At work all day
Young Featherhood
By Evan Hansen
Market forces of evening. I place the infant
in a vibrating chair purchased at Target.
Plush monkeys encircle her. A tinny song plays.
I tell her welcome to Monkey Island.
When I Died Running a Red Light
By Scott Beal
they didn’t know my last thought
was thank god they weren’t in the car
that I thought of the times I’d cut off a Buick
with their bodies buckled in the backseat and seen EMTs
When I Died of a Common Brain Condition
By Scott Beal
were they relieved that my suffering was over
had I told them my one great fear
was being unable to remember or think
in the way that was mine
When I Died of Butterflies
By Scott Beal
they had to go on doing algebra
and taking out the trash
there was no patch they could point to
and say that’s where he lies
Untitled
By Simon Perchik
With your mouth closed
swallow though this rain
is already rain and further on
The Inventory
By Courtney Moreno
Billy was sitting on a stool at the kitchen counter, swallowing the last of her medications, when Gustave arrived. She watched him dig for his key. The front door was a French door, with panes of glass embedded in the wood.
Orthodox Christians
By Thea Swanson
On Saturday nights in Washington, Orthodox Christian priests wear black dresses to their feet. They have smooth ponytails and scraggly beards. They have many children and one modest wife. They hold vigil in dark churches lit with candles.
Addendum
By Jen Schalliol
Or so she says. The poem’s a lie
of green, an assurance of a clean
bill of health, a hope to carry on
Color Theory
By Jen Schalliol
turning white with light or milk
the color of music says one
and another says: obscene
the moon’s white face. this year is white
Ave
By Jessica Murray
For a sign, a pinhole in the firmament,
and me the open eye.
Peace without stasis, each mellow
fruit
eaten.
Excerpt from The Greenhouse
By Andrei Babikov
Translated by Michael Gluck
Little is known about the nameless author of The Strange Book. One source claims that he was a Ligurian translator and scribe who moved to prosperous Florence in search of a better life.
Ground Fog
By Roger Mensink
My name is Brittany Benjamin, and life is raining gummy bears (my favorite sweets), not only because I am blessed—my parents are both college professors, both tenured;