NUDES IN WATER SERIES
By Karin Rosenthal
My desire to photograph nudes was born of the water, of a passion for being in and meditating upon still waters.
Archives: Content
Poetry Editor’s Note
By Ben Berman
If we think of rhythm as the relationship between contrasting elements, then there is a wonderful rhythmic conversation playing throughout all the poems in this issue. Why do we say things that can break glass? Matthew Gallant asks in his poem Inscription, just as Richard Garcia’s piece offers us the destruction of light into painful shards. Meanwhile… Read more »
Spring 2014 Editor’s Note
By Lee Hope
First, a timely ANNOUNCEMENT: Solsticelitmag will be on a Grub Street panel with Talking Writing on the topic: DigitalLit: Why Online Journals Deserve More Respect at 3:45 at the Park Plaza Hotel in Boston on Friday, May 2nd. Also, we’ll be a party where editors meet writers on Thursday eve from 5-7 pm. https://grubstreet.org/muse/lit-week-2014/thursday-may-1st/ … Read more »
(Untitled)
By Serhiy Zhadan
Everything, as always, is justified—
All the roads you’ve traveled and even the futile ones,
ATHEISM
By Serhiy Zhadan
Translated by Michael M. Naydan You always approached this with suspicion Mary But here the udder of his heart flows with the milk of pain And you sitting beside him there all night in the wind and rain feel how your skin becomes burned with the rust of doubt You carefully look at the… Read more »
Follow the herd and all occasion for regret will disappear
By Hsia Yü
Of all the things it could be how come
The entry code to the building I live in the green door at No. 37
That was Then and This is Now but We’re Finally in Synch
By Hsia Yü
One day as I awoke I asked myself
Is this the future
A Dollop of Meringue
By Nathan Slinker
Nothing happening in the man’s head happens
to feel as good as lemon squares taste before
breakfast but after coffee, when the moon,
Off Switch
By Manu Samriti Chander
I knew a cabby whose honest-to-God
Name was Finally, the first word
His mother uttered when he came out
Kim Jong Un, Supreme Leader of North Korea, in Gangnam District
By Franny Choi
Like any foreigner, he thinks first of the song, the pudgy rodeo clown, lewd confetti vomited on the mall roof. The Apgujeong store fronts flash diamond teeth, neon kaleidoscope. The Supreme Leader of North Korea is a ferris wheel, drunk with light and rage. What they have let happen. The Supreme Leader buys a… Read more »
Mad Libs I
By Franny Choi
My body is an entire ____________________ wrangled into a jar.
[body of water]
The Resurrection of Captain John Brown
By Michael Mlekoday
I was raised by wolves and I learned
to eat earth. I was raised by a bottle
I found washed up by my hut,
Medusa’s Dinner Party
By Fatimah Asghar
I. In the Grocery Store
We weave the shopping cart down the aisle,
In the Psych Ward
By Stevie Edwards
A choking terror detonates the psych ward:
drug-blank faces of fellow patients who mind
their minds, who converse with shadows, won’t eat
Lumpy, an American Sonnet
By Sean DesVignes
Since the Bible never says Adam & Eve ate an apple,
why must we be so specific? I would enjoy a love scene
The Ruins
By Wesley Rothman
No thing erases. Myth’s wind cannot blot
out the name in alabaster. Atlantis lives
I await the night with dread; await the night with longing
By Marilyn McCabe
With its black strokes, singing, it smears me, lavish. I’m the night’s white canvas turbulent and stiff. I can grab the stars in my hand. They burn but I can’t let them loose.
This liquid in state of frozen chaos holds
By Marilyn McCabe
my forehead. I lean against it, look at the snow
that would not hold me, its agreements
more lax, more wink and nudge.
River Metaphysics
By J. Scott Brownlee
Inside my catfish body you will find
two additional fish—blue & washed
in wet light through the translucent
[With each handful you dead]
By Simon Perchik
With each handful you dead
breathe in, nourished by dirt
by these leaves half stone
Poetry Editor’s Note
By Jamaal May
Poetry movements are, by their nature, inherently about a narrowing of possibility (let’s all stop doing that and start doing this). What tends to follow such narrowing is a synthesis between 1) what the movement brought into relief, 2) whatever movement it was a reaction to, and 3) the wildcard possibilities explored by daring new… Read more »
Whiskey Under the Mattress, Playboy on the Porch
By Trent Masiki
Once in Texas, I pulled up next to a Latino asleep in something like an Impala, outside the washeteria where I had come to do my laundry.
Orality Hunger (for David Shields)
By Thomas Larson
Since I began writing nonfiction more than two decades ago, I’ve ranged from book to long-form journalism, criticism, essay, memoir, and, of late, video essay.
An Ugly Anniversary
By Martin C. Hansen
On November 22, 2013, I woke with brains in mind. Funny, I haven’t heard much chatter about other November twenty-seconds, but this nice, round number—the half-century, the big five-OH!
Reflections on Psychiatry, the Fear of Insanity, Trauma and Psychotherapy
By Dr. Tom Mallouk
I was fired from my first two jobs in psychology. Basically, I had made the mistake of talking to people.
The Uncomfortable Millionaire
By John Brown Spiers
Claude Charles is an uncomfortable millionaire. He works hard to hide what he calls his “creeping suspicion—that something is not right.”
Elevor
By David Low
When Emily Wong moved to Manhattan from Poughkeepsie, she started to freak out on elevators. It began at Saks Fifth Avenue.
Table Rock
By Vincent Craig Wright
The moon glaring above Table Rock’s got me thinking about our field trip up there in ninth grade and falling in love with this girl I never knew before.
Dukkha
By Steven Huff
Wayne and Abby kept an open package of sleeping pills just sitting around the way another couple might keep a dish of exotic bitter candy that appears to be for anyone to grab
The Hudson
By Steven Huff
Before I became her darling I towed wrecked machines down the river behind my rowboat. Any kind of wreck you’ve got.
THE QUIET CAR
By Elizabeth Searle
“Ma’am? You may have to leave.”
The deep Godlike voice from the train’s loudspeaker, only live. Anne stiffens in her seat in the Quiet Car.
An American Family
By Eric Charles May
When Clarion Woodbury was a boy, we’re talking the early 1960s, the New Orleans house of his grandmother was a not very wide, three-story building set on the northwest corner of a shady block.
Before You Can Change Your Mind
By Jenifer DeBellis
The roads are slick, freshly coated with autumn leaves mixed with last night’s rain.
House on the Rocks
By Catherine Bell
Our house was the finest house in town, on the highest point of rocks, with the widest view of Boston and the islands and the open sea.
Water Issues
By Dominic Chavez
FREETOWN, Sierra Leone — In Kroo Bay, a slum located in the heart of Freetown, mounds of raw sewage seep into pools of stagnant water.
Testimony
By Kent Foreman
Suffragette
By Kent Foreman
Editor’s Note
By Lee Hope
This issue of Solsticelitmag is one of our best ever and embodies our commitment to diversity. First, our cover photograph by world-famous photographer Eli Reed, as well as the other eight pieces in his Mozambique series, depict his dedication to human rights. And in promoting human rights, please read in fiction: Nahid Rachlin’s haunting piece… Read more »
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