Unopened Whiskey and Wine
By Marc Tretin
A charcoal shadow accompanies my husband down the stairs.
He is to steady the ladder so I can change the bulb that’s set
Archives: Content
Questions, 1969
By Wendy Mnookin
Huge and unembarrassed, my friend floated like a Buddha in the small pool. I drank iced tea, graded chlorine-splashed papers on The Mayor of Casterbridge. When she had her baby on a bed covered with a shower curtain, I did what I was told, sealed the placenta in a plastic bag, stashed it in the… Read more »
Smoke
By Lynne Knight
Alexander VI kept hemp fires burning
to remind himself that everything is ephemeral
Provincetown
By Penny Guisinger
Black or white. Open or shut. Up or down. Chocolate or vanilla. Shirts or skins.
Absolution
By Tracy L. Strauss
“Are you pretty or are you ugly?” my father asked.
I looked up at his soft brown eyes, his pink lips pursed in a half-smile, and I guessed, hoping, “Pretty?” I was five.
Hold Me Say You Will
By JL Schneider
I jumped on Mr. Curry’s back and held him. It wasn’t easy, possessed as he was by the animal fury of a man whose family was threatened.
Summer 2013 Editor’s Note
By Lee Hope
Our 2013 Summer Awards Issue, one of our strongest publications, with winners and finalists from Africa to Australia, is dedicated to the memory of Kurt Brown, Solstice literary magazine’s distinguished poetry editor. Kurt is author of many books of poetry and nonfiction, and he also edited anthologies to promote the work of other writers. Our associate poetry… Read more »
The Alchemy of Memory
By Fran Forman
My artistic process is an act of intuition, investigation, and the amalgam of seemingly random objects.
The Boys
By Margot Wizansky
They called me Maggot-the-unborn-fly
and Lanny Millman shot me with a BB gun—
Salsaholico
By Danielle Monroe
Your girl doesn’t call. Why would she? You haven’t heard from her in five days. She isn’t your girl. She was never your girl.
Eulogy of Jimi Christ (Video)
By Regie O’Hare Gibson
Creation Myth (Video)
By Regie O’Hare Gibson
Silvertone (Video)
By Dzvinia Orlowsky
Karl Will Bring A Picnic
By Leslie Lawrence
A week or two into our son’s first summer at overnight camp, I got a call from my Uncle Karl.
Is There Anything Else I Can Help You With Today
By Kurt Brown
Records topple,
the Midwest melts, rippling through a scrim of heat
as though it were an illusion
and not reality.
The Great Molasses Flood
By Ben Berman
With Prohibition on the horizon
and the demand for rum about to take off
no one could convince the supervisor
Personal & Metaphysical Derivatives
By Christopher Buckley
sus huesos yacen caidos en el povo —Eugenio Montejo At 5, I picked up French with ease attending a parochial school my parents couldn’t really afford— le morceau de gateau! I knew a table from a window, the book on the desk from the stars in the sky—le livre sur le bureau de l’école a… Read more »
The Lacework of Coherence
By Kelly Cherry
We know so little but the little we know
we place beside a neighboring bit or byte
of information, thereby shaping knowledge
as fields of knowledge, finding correspondence
Music for Airports
By Richard Garcia
To those transfixed in the tunnel of colored lights,
to those frozen on the escalators
below constellations of candles
wreathed in the cascade of didgeridoo vibrations
and the wet clicking of tree frogs.
Flood
By Dennis Hinrichsen
Shook foil—that’s what a river is. Catfish hauled like bars
of iron
from a mid-town bridge,
the wire that holds them
Fragment: Winter Journal
By Dennis Hinrichsen
…then seizure again, that
blue clot, level
of the larynx,
can’t breathe, can’t
Sub Rosa
By Lindsay Ahl
I spent my childhood in a world of imaginary
swings, the rope lines frayed, the base a heavy board. I’d do magic
higher than tree tops, high enough for the burn
Remembering Qatar in the Robes of Spring Rain
By Jim Daniels
Here in Pittsburgh, March,
rain, days-long, relentless as sin.
Ash Wednesday
but I only have beard stubble
Autumnal
By Kathleen Hellen
One-by-one the trees undress in carcasses
of seed, scatter in cascade, in flimsy under-orange,
a negligee of red. The colors lost, caught with vine between
the tines of rile and wind. What dread in bleeding?
Psalm 107
By Eugenia Leigh
Praise you for that blanket.
Praise you for the stranger
who draped it over my mother,
The Rope
By Natasha Sajé
twisted of two
strands
that pulled us
through gardens and ditches
out of caves
Dear Fisher Cat (martes pennanti)
By Natasha Sajé
Never seen you in the flesh. I’ve seen
a cousin, martes martes, stuffed, in a shop window
in Bavaria, where they chew wiring in cars,
and martes zibellina turned
The Old Moon in the New Moon’s Arms
By Jean Monahan
The trees unravel,
plowed by a bright prow.
What’s light enough
First Death in Winter
By Jean Monahan
New snow’s made our yard a white slate,
a Winter tale written out in shorthand.
Purity
By Barry Spacks
When the new kitten chooses my lap for her nest,
when miraculously I’ve earned her trust,
I feel the way the sky might feel
to learn we see it as vastly blue.
Speeding
By Barry Spacks
In an Updike story, we feel deep trust
as the young hero dozes beside his buddy
who drives them precariously through the dark.
Advice for Aspiring Writers
By Diana Der-Hovanessian
“Try talking yourself out of it.” Richard Ford
But, of course, you can’t, or won’t.
And at night the poem persists
inserting itself into what you write
Advice for Aspiring Lovers
By Diana Der-Hovanessian
Do not wax sentimental on the first “good night”.
Never mind confessing how you feel.
Fight, fight the urge and keep it light.
Between Brie and Cheddar
By Ellen Goldstein
My father could be loving. When I got ready to go back to college, he would look at me and say, “Ah, Ellen, I miss you already.”
Grown Children:
the water will hold us
By Michelle Blake
On a perfect summer afternoon in the hills of Bath County, Virginia, I find myself walking down a shaded grass path that winds along past an ice-cold pond and dead-ends at a broad, cool river.
Mind Riot
By Gail Waldstein
You could say it started when I was seven, looking through slats on the venetian blinds from my bed at sunset.
Eggplant
By Sven Birkerts
It’s my night to make something, not that it was assigned to me but it’s one of those things that’s part of the knowing portion of a marriage, all to do with the subtle, sometimes not so subtle,
Hansel and Gretel
By Laura Williams McCaffrey
In the light of the gibbous moon, beneath the thick boughs of ancient oaks, a girl pulled her brother from the gingerbread house, trailed by smoke that stank of burned sugar and flesh.
Totem
By Robert M. Herzog
Cedric wasn’t drunk. Spirits from the spirits, he told himself. That was a sober man’s thought, wasn’t it? The neck of the bottle was in his mouth.
Connections
By Marion de Booy Wentzien
Vincent and Harry have come to install broadband. Zip has convinced me we need this more than we need new kitchen cabinets. Never mind that all the cupboard doors are sprung and that the only way to shut the cupboards is with rubber bands twisted three times. Both guys are short and have buzzed hair with a slash on one side.
Look Away
By David Sahl
A cool, misty fog collects in her hair. Fine droplets gather and flow in tiny rivulets following the smile lines of her face. They slide from her jaw to dampen and discolor her thin blouse. She doesn’t notice.
The Kite
By Christopher Anderson
Dottie was pregnant. I was a math instructor at Seattle Community College. There was an Indian summer that September, not a drop of rain until the 20th. One warm and windy day I took my 5-year-old son Philip to Lincoln Park with a kite.
Divinest Sense
By Susan Agar
The road is long and vanishes into a horizon without end. The land is covered with frozen snow as far as you can see.
Knothole
By Gregory Wolos
The boy whose gloved hand I hold as we cross the busy street on the way to his elementary school is my ex-wife’s son. To him I’m Uncle Tim, his emergency babysitter. He’s no blood of mine. I don’t think Austin knows how sick his father is, that the man’s knocking at death’s door, that… Read more »
Haiku: Photographic Meditations
By David Fokos
From decades of work, I came to understand that because our emotional responses are based in time, if I want to express the emotion I felt (as opposed to the emotion felt by the subject, or a generalized abstract emotion) at the time the photograph was made, that I must also encode the element of time within the image.
Spring 2013 Editor’s Note
By Lee Hope
Many of us on the staff of Solstice lit mag, a Boston-based, international journal, feel the reverberations of the tragic events at the Boston Marathon. Our cover, by the well-known photographer, David Fokos, shows the undergirding of a bridge over Storrow Drive. We chose this cover image many months before this year’s Marathon, but we… Read more »
Fall/Winter 2011 Editor’s Note
By Lee Hope
March UPDATE: GREAT NEWS, Announcing a Solstice winner of the 2011 BEST OF THE NET AWARDS–Michelle Cacho-Negrete in nonfiction for “Stealing.” Also Presenting our THIRD ANNUAL LITERARY CONTEST: Announcing the new annual STEPHEN DUNN PRIZE IN POETRY: $500. Stephen Dunn won the Pulitzer Prize for Different Hours and is the distinguished author of 15 other… Read more »
Spring 2011 EDITOR’S NOTE
By Lee Hope
Special Editor’s Note: Announcing our 2011 SOLSTICE CONTEST WINNERS! (Also, we will be announcing in the next two weeks, “Solstice Editors’ Picks” –Special contest entries that will be given recognition and publication. So, if you are not among the Sol Contest finalists, stay tuned….) AWARD WINNERS: Winners and finalists to be published in our Summer… Read more »
Summer 2011 Editor’s Note
By Lee Hope
Welcome to Solstice’s second annual Summer Awards Issue. Many many thanks to our judges, David Huddle for fiction and A. Van Jordan for poetry. Thomas Benz’s “Casual Impostor,” winner of the $1,000 fiction award, is a story of ironic displacement. Benz brilliantly vacillates between reality and illusion. The fiction runner-up, Wesley Brown’s “Too Young for… Read more »
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