Ice
By Michael Miner
Where to begin? How about right now?
The Silk City Police Department. I am waiting in the police station in an interrogation room for my father to show up.
Archives: Content
Color Impressions
By Amie Tannenbaum
Primarily known as a natural light photographer, AMIE G. TANNENBAUM specializes in extreme macro / close-up camera techniques to capture abstract photoart and to create “color impressions” — those images which result when sunlight shining through studio stained glass windows produces a myriad of vivid colorations that penetrate through, reflect on, and illuminate textured glass,… Read more »
Thinking of the Anhinga
By Helena Minton
Bad habits persist:
The nail biting, the bickering.
Beside the sand trap
like a bull fighter’s cape . . .
Moon Water
By Damien Echols
A person can starve to death in prison. By starving I don’t mean death through lack of food.
Claiming Kin
By Gerald Duff
(Excerpt from Home Truths) Dreams are a subset of lies, the way the unconscious mind works to make it possible for us to keep living with ourselves.
The Most Dangerous Place on Earth
By Marie Myung-Ok Lee
The beaming portrait of Kim Il Sung on the roof of the Pyongyang Airport was the first thing that greeted us when we emerged from our plane
Breastless
By Celia Jeffries
I have a man-made breast. It was created fourteen years ago from a saline implant and a piece of my latissimus dorsi.
Through Birds, Through Fire But Not Through Glass
By Dennis Hinrichsen
The food is cold and so his mind drifts
a blue fin angling toward deeper water
Radium City
By Dennis Hinrichsen
It was the watches I wanted, those radium dials
Glowing like bomb sights
Mowing with Cutlasses
By Laban Hill
Twenty right arms, sometimes together, but mostly not,
arc cutlasses in wide, irregular swings, nearly throwing themselves
At the Window
By Betsy Sholl
If the doctor’s new machine is right, my eyes
are turning into old window glass, warped . . .
Elegy with Sacred Heart
By Betsy Sholl
It’s always winter when I think of him,
gray skies, fog seeping up from the harbor . . .
Notes from the Night Shift
By Theodore Deppe
Driving at dusk to the hospital to sit up with my mother,
I paused at the crossroads where half a century ago . . .
Vertigo & Adagio
By Theodore Deppe
That particular part of the trip—the journey’s beginning—
he hadn’t figured out. Large hills terrified him,
and the train was climbing the north slopes of the Alps.
Smoke Break
By Sandi Johnson
I take my required smoke break during the hours the sun is most reluctant to wake.
I relax on the edge of my Buick and extend my feet to the red hood of my mom’s Sunfire . . .
On Sex and Insects
By Ben Berman
Whenever Marwizi would put down his beer and start winking at those heavy-set ladies of the night, I’d try to slip him a condom before he slipped to the back of the bar. Who has the time? he’d say. I’m practically on fire. The closest my loins ever came to . . .
The Unseasoned
By Ben Berman
When, as guests of honor in Vietnam,
we were served dog penis and the testicles
sat on our plates like Venn Diagrams . . .
Hard Work
By Kathleen Aguero
Hope springs eternal
but I couldn’t imagine how hope,
before it gets to that bubbling place,
forces itself through miles of dirt packed hard . . .
Alien Hand
By Grace Talusan
Before he left the Philippines to move in with his son, the American doctor, Titong made a bargain with himself: He would burn cigarettes on the tip of each finger before going back to his old ways. Yet, here he was, in his granddaughter’s room, beside her bed, in the middle of the night.
Decker
By James Sprouse
We peeled off our rain gear at the back door of the Grant’s Pass Hotel, wrung the water out of our gloves, and traded our muddy boots for sneakers and moccasins. It wasn’t dark, but it might as well have been.
Street Theatre
By Louis Panagotopulos
When I was in college it was known as guerilla theatre. I saw a lot of it in Harvard Square – activists in mawkish costumes dramatizing social and political issues, small crowds of curious pedestrians stopping to hear diatribes like . . .
Pomegranate
By Helen Elaine Lee
(Excerpt from Life Without) Choosing, it’s like a pomegranate fruit. Maxine talked one up once and when she did, I could almost taste it, almost hold it in my hands, like this.
Teggin
By Karima Grant
The yard was noisy, the women’s voices rising in unison, rising in dissension, rising sharply into the gathering night that had long ago chased away the men.
The Square Seascapes Series
By Alison Shaw
At the remote tip of Cape Cod lies a vast terrain of rolling sand dunes, scrub oak and pine, bogs and marshes. I chose a square format, the simplest possible shape – in each picture I split the frame into two equal parts, placing the horizon in the center of the frame, thus forming a… Read more »
Zazz Zu Zazz
By Wesley Brown
I’d stopped at a drugstore on 125th Street after school to buy some bubble gum when I heard a scuffle break out and a woman scream…
Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right
By Curtis Tompkins
When I asked Bird if she would stay for good, she laughed and said You should know by now. Don’t you know what I’m thinking? This was after the fire…
Memory, Fact, Imagination, Research: Memoir’s Hybrid Personality
By Michael Steinberg
At a writers’ conference not long ago, I gave a public reading from “Trading Off,” a memoir that for the most part dramatizes a turbulent relationship I’d had with an old high school baseball coach. During the q and a, I was asked the usual questions: “Did it really happen the way you wrote it?”
An Elongated Tear: Culebra
By Anne-Marie Oomen
Culebra is an American Virgin island with a fierce sound for a past, a sound that still hollows it out and leaves it damaged…
Long Gone, a Tamara Hayle Mystery — Chapter One
By Valerie Wilson Wesley
I was Pet Hayle’s one and only call, which shocked the hell out of me…
Miss France 1993 [1]
By Jina Ortiz
Mon Guadalupe,
I left you with my patriotic
sash around my waist…
Fruit in Season
By Richard Hoffman
That spring after my brother’s
death I worked in an orchard . . .
World Wide Web
By Kurt Brown
It’s a little like Gulliver, pinned down by Lilliputians—
the whole planet woven back and forth with invisible bonds of electricity…
Season of Giving
By Roland Merullo
It was the humblest of hometowns, but in a secret place inside himself he liked to think of it as The City By The Sea…
One Last Time
By Tanya Whiton
“Danny died Tuesday,” Parker’s tight voice announces.
“I’m not having a good day,” I tell the answering machine, refusing to pick up…
Popular Music
By Kathleen Aguero
All winter I drove to work Oh, what a beautiful morning!
singing in my head as if I believed in the power
of positive thinking…
Funeral Detail – April 2009 from We All Fall Down
By Brad Watts
As the rain poured down, Justin was not looking forward to getting out of the van. He was not looking forward to playing the fake, electric, bugle for the hero that he was being paid fifty bucks to honor…
Lazarus, Raised
By Kathleen Aguero
Voices fade then roar. Figures shifting
in and out of focus unbind his hands and feet…
Lazarus shoves them aside…
Silvertone
By Dzvinia Orlowsky
Every Friday my father’s voice, drunk
on plum Slivovitz, rose from our basement…
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