Spring 2012

• Fiction

  • This Is A Success Story

    Fiction By Jaimee Wriston Colbert

    There are over five hundred diseases that list headaches as a symptom, from hangovers to brain tumors to the bubonic plague.

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  • Triple X

    Fiction By Kashana Cauley

    Jade had been in the bathroom far too long given that it should have only taken a second to inhale the stuff I’d just given her, and I fingered the top bill in my pocket, the hundred bucks she’d given me for it …

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  • The Cliffs

    Fiction By Jonathan Curelop

    It was 10:30, they’d been searching the flat fields west of town only an hour, and already she needed to rest. Emily looked at her father, sweat glistening across his forehead, his skin flushed.

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  • Valencia

    Fiction By Roland Merullo

    One of the first things I did after my father died and the vast wealth he had spent his life accumulating came cascading down into my hands was to go and visit Valencia.

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  • Just When I Think I’m Ready To Leave

    Fiction By Leslie Johnson

    I had my jacket on and zipped. I was wearing my burgundy parka, the same one I’d had since middle school, seventh grade, and it still fit me fine nine years later, and it looked about the same, too.

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  • Life Is Brief

    Fiction By Steven Huff

    Later that day, someone would claim to have seen a surface-to-air missile strike the plane. Another witness on the ground would claim two or three missiles, he couldn’t be sure.

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  • Narrowed Passages

    Fiction By Laura Snyder

    Flat round leaves slid back and forth over black marsh water. Scattered amongst them were occasional yellow fisted lilies, some with their heads closed tight, others opened.

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  • Unbridled

    Fiction By Perle Besserman

    How sweet were those six, seven, and eight-hour love marathons on the rickety bed near the window with its brown, stained shade drawn almost to the floor …

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  • Horse Crazy

    Fiction By John Solensten

    Before she left, Nancy White Feather told Charlie Good Thunder a lot of things–some wistful, some stone-faced angry: “You have got a lot of things on your mind, but–most of all–you have got horses on the brain–forever on the brain.

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• Poetry

  • A Poem to be the Poem that Was

    Poetry By Danielle Georges

    winding itself down a dark alleyway
    when dusk was most dusk and threatening
    day with never returning …

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  • Elegy for Tim Johnson

    Poetry By Danielle Georges

    Tim Johnson, you are dead
    though we spent Christmas together
    many years ago …

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  • Three Takes on Spring

    Poetry By Charles Rafferty

    It’s spring
    and the deer that died on the ice
    amid a stippling
    of bloody paw prints …

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  • Dangerous Children

    Poetry By Carole Hobbs

    That night, undressing me for bed,
    my mother pulled my sweater
    over my head with that slight claustrophobic …

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  • Winter Evening

    Poetry By Carole Hobbs

    In the kitchen, I walked a broad arc
    around the wringer washer –
    If it catches your hair …

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  • Exhibit

    Poetry By David O'Connell

    How far it’s come, epochs
    and continents. Before man
    deified the lightning’s fire …

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  • Before He Enlisted

    Poetry By Brian Fanelli

    I used to believe a thousand protest signs
    could alter decisions of lawmakers and kings,
    save my friend from eight more months in Iraq …

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  • Exposures

    Poetry By Teresa Sutton

    The snapshot shows three white-toothed grins,
    sunburned cheeks and noses. My brothers
    and I pose in front of a giant Reese’s Peanut …

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  • The Museum of Broken Relationships

    Poetry By Julie Danho

    Of course bears, wedding dresses,
    letters for Johns. But also the axe
    with butchered bed …

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  • The Gods

    Poetry By Wendy Mnookin

    My father spins and spins me
    till, released, I stumble forward,
    arms outstretched, clutching …

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  • Boardwalk Rhapsody

    Poetry By Wendy Mnookin

    My father and I
    stroll by the sea.
    He’s in a white suit …

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  • The Asylum Seeker

    Poetry By Barbara Boches

    She enters softly today, her firm step
    and swaying hips gone as she slips in,
    whispering to God for forgiveness …

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  • A Poem for Happy Endings

    Poetry By Charles Coe

    The hero gets the girl.
    The villain plunges to his death;
    his bitter face disappears in fire and smoke …

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  • Question

    Poetry By Paul Hostovsky

    If a man falls to his knees in a forest
    and there’s nobody there to hear
    his soft weeping …

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  • Schadenfreude

    Poetry By Paul Hostovsky

    “Leave it to the Germans,” said Ben.
    “They didn’t invent it,” I said. “They just named it.”
    “To name a thing is to own it,” he said. “It’s theirs.”

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• Nonfiction

  • Hair

    Nonfiction By Michele Cacho-Negrete

    One Saturday a month, for twenty-five years, my mother and the upstairs neighbor, Frances, dyed each other’s hair. The two would chat and gossip over a growing mound of lipstick-tipped cigarettes and endless cups of coffee as they “partook of the fountain of youth,” their euphemism for this process.

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  • An Open Letter to Afghanistan and Iraq War Vets

    Nonfiction By Everett Cox

    Dear Brothers & Sisters of the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,
    Please don’t kill yourselves. Don’t do it. The suicide rate for Afghan/Iraq War vets is five times the numbers that die in the war, now about one an hour or 24 a day.

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  • Shamrocks and Salad Days

    Nonfiction By DeWitt Henry

    Seamus Heaney is a generous man by nature and by principle; perhaps sometimes too much so for his own good. He has written a humorous, yet wrenching poem about divided domestic and professional responsibilities, “An Afterwards.”

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  • It’s Complicated

    Nonfiction By Alejandro Ramirez

    “Where are you from?”
    “Lawrence, Massachusetts.”
    “No, like, where’s your family from? Y’know, what are you?”

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  • In Praise of Quentin Anderson

    Nonfiction By Baron Wormser

    Writing of Hawthorne, Cooper, Melville and Twain, Quentin Anderson posed the following question in his book The Imperial Self: an Essay in American Literary and Cultural History: “Their struggles do indeed attest to the difficulty of growing up in this country—but what nation had ever gone so far toward dissolving social ties as this one?”

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• Photography

  • 

    WaterMaine

    photography By Pippi Ellison

    I am endlessly fascinated by water: the surface, the depth, the flow and power to transform, the special places where the unseen becomes seen.

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