In workshop, Tall Tony rises, bites his bottom lip, confesses, Every night, I dream of living in a house. We listen to him recall the day his dad left, how the thud of the front door rattled kitchen plates. He then raises his gaze, looks at us through smudged glasses, shuffles to his seat in … Read more
Tyrone has a walk, a don’t-fuck-with-me gait. Second day of class, he calls Wheatley an Uncle Tom. That poet just followed those aristocrats who enslaved her, adopted their social order, he says. By mid-semester, he dismisses Woolf, rolls his eyes at Plath. Those writers and their suicides, he says. He praises Hansberry, digs A Raisin … Read more
The engraver and cartographer, John Spilsbury, of London, is believed to have produced the firstjigsaw puzzle around 1760, using a marquetry saw. I learned the world as I sat, still as a stone while the sky broke into puzzle pieces and fell on me. “There it is,” I thought, “just waiting for me to put … Read more
I have craved and coveted until my throat closed with the exhaustion of it. The same goes for waiting. I foresaw a certain future which did not take place so I waited until another future rose up, brought lessons cruising through the bedrooms of my days like a Continental Town Car (circa … Read more
“Jeemy says, ‘Ah-DAH!’” This was the observation of my cousin Dave, six months older than I and infinitely more articulate. Either he was fast in learning to talk, or I was slow. He reported my utterance to my mother, brother, and sister, and they laughingly repeated it for years to come. My first recorded attempt … Read more
Remembering that morning, as father stood wavering on the beach, his toe writing about mother in the sand, while the sea and sky converged on his figure like two blades. Remember that afternoon, as he paced by the collapsing waves, and the gulls broke the blank hotel silence, circling over the field of palm stubble … Read more
Regarding the traffic spilling down the streets at dusk, slow pleasure, as the brakes are pressed, released, and pressed again. Regarding the canvas flag in the plaza giving way in the wind, folding up, framing a triangle of sky and snapping to attention again. Regarding the pale stones lining the dark paths in the park, … Read more
Twlight in a small town, the boys prowling the street, driving around helpless and full of longing. Two children burst from the shadows and run into a doorway, quivering like moths, their torches arched with joy, as they shout, “S’prised you!” Grandmother steps onto the porch and calls in a level voice, “Home now.”Joan E. … Read more
There’s a sign in the lobby that reads: Fine in unblinking neon. The day before you arrive, I don’t notice. After you’re gone, it’s there — suddenly constant, freakishly pink. The hotel bartender, from Kansas, tells me he builds large scale sculptures. He’s trying to reconstruct the one room schoolhouse his mother taught in on … Read more
Nigel regrets his rap days. I make mixes of emo songs I loved ten years ago. In Texas, he’s divorced and I’m dying. Back home there’s him in a track suit performing in Kim Shorey’s basement. And then there’s me loving it. I’m Rob Base and I came to get down… This is what adults … Read more
In our shadowed bedroom a small weight leans against me, surprises me awake. The dog’s sigh echoes my wife, both restless in their dreams. She lifts him onto our bed when tom-toms of thunder drive nightmares up the horizon, or on the first thankful night we return home from a trip. This satisfies his need … Read more
Take the stairway down past strewn and damp-dappled rough hewn planks broken cobbles holding the crush above the weight of ruined rooms feel for each step hopelessness choking thoughts your breath loud proceed over splinters torn photos memories a murmur ahead explains the dampness on your skin the stirring of waters your foot goes suddenly … Read more
I never played Bloody Mary in my mother’s bathroom mirror. It was thin and tall and displayed random black spots through its lens as clearly as it did my big, turned nose and fat gap between my front teeth. The mirror, bastard by nature, hung tightly to the back of the bathroom door and was … Read more
Violently sundered, shattered, we are ash and debris – ragged fragments of song now borne away by the light. Steve Wilson’s work has appeared in journals and anthologies nationwide, as well in three collections – the most recent entitled The Lost Seventh. He teaches creative writing and Beat Literature at Texas … Read more
The Fall 2014 issue features Creative Nonfiction from Marcia Bradley, Stanzi, Frei, and Sara Walters. Fiction from Lynne M. Hinkey. Poetry from Jim Bartruff, Scott Chalupa, Carol V. Davis, Nadya Rousseau, Jeremy Voigt, Barry Yeoman and many more.
There is a chair beneath the cherry tree. Velvet red upholstery peeling off the yellow foam. There are no cherries left, and no one in the chair. Two emptinesses, therefore, commune in the late cicada silence. I would sit but, look, the seat is wet with August rain.Cameron Morse taught and studied in China. He … Read more
An early dark, instant of rain, then the birds again quicken, and seedpods pirouette all spring long. The world’s awash in whirligigs, the mindless and innumerable attempts to be again, even if only for a moment or terminally, a tree, even the last tree, standing at the edge of galaxies, twisted roots rearing out into … Read more
He joked to Janice that maybe his next job could be writing reviews for the local newspaper, except that he would write interesting ones, since every article in the paper was about some town meeting or how the garbage dump smelled. She smirked. “Start with the bowling alley in town then, and copy someone’s review … Read more
I peel the asparagus’ flattened stems one by one. The grill is hot, sweet potatoes done. Randy says he has to phone Jim and ask about Sharon. It is dusk, but from where I stand I don’t see the orange sky. I usually peel my asparagus with a potato peeler. I slide the sharp edge … Read more
Saturdays were piano days. Each week, Mom eased our maroon ’79 Grand Prix into the Southwestern faux-paradise of Sun City, Arizona, its streets lined with palm trees and tidy beds of gravel. Inside the white barrier walls, lazy herds of Continentals, Cadillacs, and golf carts grazed between the lush grass medians and strip shopping centers … Read more
She said to draw some blood and find a young dog to swallow it and scrape food from the four corners of the table and feed it to him in the morning Take the eye of the dog if a wolf can’t be found and sew it into your right sleeve This cools the blood … Read more
To stop in the garden, to wrench an ear of corn from its stalk, to eat it raw and sweet beneath an August sky: always worthwhile to do this. You could also sell the ear of corn for fifty cents. If you sold a thousand ears of corn, you’d earn enough to buy yourself a … Read more
Heraclitus got it wrong; time’s no river, but swells in waves, a dark sea or the passing wind upon a field of rye. Abreast the mounting wave – and with a rush, outstripping your breath, it lifts your carcass, punches your gut – you’re left gasping there on the packed earth, shaking salt-crystals from your … Read more
The worms have set their tents in the locust trees: it’s another caterpillar summer, a season for gnawing and changing. The silvered chrysalis pendant from the milkweed leaf is lovely, but the tents in the trees make one uneasy, these dirty silk bags with their shadow-play of a hundred creeping larval bodies, faceless and half … Read more
Wild forsythia lean their yellow tongues over the cutbank where storms gouged out the land. Trout that lasted winter hold below the boughs like wind chimes singing in the current. What counts is touch, skin on skin, not the knife sliding down the white belly, revealing white meat and blood. I’m happy enough to know … Read more
