Azazil
Amit Majmudar
He [Azazil] was told: Bow down! He said, “I will bow to no other.” He was asked, Even if you receive My curse? He said, “It does not matter. I have no way to an other-than-You. I am an abject…
22. Across; 30. Across
Noah Falck
from Life as a Crossword Puzzle 22. Across In the dream where people relive the same moment over and over he whispered, Build me a beginning. Then arranged himself in front of a Polaroid camera. His eyes leaked a gravitational…
Anchor Point
Mika Taylor
There was an incident that morning, at McDonald’s. “A confrontation,” Dad said, “with the cashier. No big deal, but Zack’s upset still.” “What did he do?” I’d asked. “Nothing, Annie. It was a misunderstanding. He’ll be fine.” But it wasn’t…
A Hypothesis
Jess Lacher
Supporting Facts: Friday Observation of nightly decapitation: Mark’s orange windbreaker, too light for this weather, sits just where he left it, on the back of the only chair in the room. In the night, light from passing cars plays over…
Erotic Dialogues
Kascha Semonovitch
Same Life. Maureen N. McLane. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. 128 pp. $24.00, hardcover. Intruder. Jill Bialosky. New York: Knopf, 2008. 96 pp. $25.00, hardcover. Maureen N. McLane’s Same Life and Jill Bialosky’s Intruder are erotic dialogues. But…
On Louise Glück’s A Village Life
Zach Savich
Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 2009, 72 pages, $23.00. Like several of the most affecting poems in Louise Glück’s new collection, A Village Life, “In the Café” adopts a persona that does not confess itself but discusses others. “It’s natural to…
A Boy And His Sister
Thirii Myint
Say a boy is born in a village in Vietnam. But he is a Chinese boy, so already his family is different. And on the day this boy is born, his sister falls into the village well and is never…
Exhibit G; Exhibit Z
Gretchen E. Henderson
Exhibit G Flares seed rains. Fires, floods. More fires and floods—no matter, it seems. Seasonal cycles persist, as bodies swarm at ocean’s edge. Irrigating ducts make this arid basin bloom. The fittest survive thanks to migrant fingers. The forecast boasts…
Shark
Rachel Yoder
That summer Ian’s mama was dying of cancer. Long after, he would remember the thunderstorms—how they blew in quick and let down hard, how the clouds came and ate the sky, how even after they were gone he could still…
When You Arrived
Alice Notley
The immigrants arrive, grave and with torches, a billion of us. In dreams you’re compelled to be in the drama you’re in. I was sleeping with him at his desk, each had our own greyhound His desk was a bed,…
The Maturation Of Man:
Daniel Khalastchi
Because rain. Because hard. Because pain in my ribs, because buckle and wait. Because cramping. Because kneeling low. Because pause. Because fact. Because wings unreel the flat spread of my stomach. Because feathers. Because damp. Because red, white, because loose the skin falls to all- pile my shoes. Because shirt. Because…
On Anna Journeys If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting
Kara Candito
University of Georgia Press, 2009, 90 pages Reading through a recent batch of first poetry collections, I find myself returning again and again to Anna Journey’s If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting. It’s not just because Journey’s poetry marks…
Captioning Emily
Celeste Ng
The white supremacists put her picture on their website. She’s very fair, a little freckled, pretty, petite. Her head tilts to the left, as if she’s sizing you up, but she’s smiling. Ripples of reddish-brown hair fill the frame. They’ve…
On D. A. Powell’s Chronic
Jerry Harp
Graywolf Press, 2009, 64 pages According to recent estimates, life arose on our planet some 3.8 billion years ago. This life has evolved through the byways and rough roads of deep time to produce human beings with all of our…
Review of Woman’s World: A Novel
James Guida
Graham Rawle, Soft Skull Press, 2008, 437 pages Hazlitt wrote of Candide that “Each sentence is telling and it reads like one sentence.” Though he seems serenely without philosophical ambitions, the British artist and puzzle-maker Graham Rawle has likewise written…
The Beauty of Where We Have Been Living; Medieval Physics
Sarah Gridley
The Beauty of Where We Have Been Living This takes hold of soil and here. In the same way sun flowers the sea, in the same way seeds lie in the light. A buoy bell rocks above a farm’s long…
Tell Yourself
Bonnie Jo Campbell
Do not hate all men just because your daughter has come out of her bedroom wearing low-cut jeans that ride so low her pubic hair would be showing, if she had pubic hair. She says all the middle school girls…
Glass
Elaine Bleakney
I was fixed in him; glass would not stream from itself. I took the window down; the woods now other woods surrounding. I took myself to a class on Berry Street. The place for him inarticulate. Tandem, the teacher took…
Silent Montage With Late Reagan in Black & White
Brian Barker
He feels the white room stuccoed behind his smile— He feels the silence like an undertow of tentacles, & the nurses’ hats are canvas sails scorched with sunlight, gauzy curtains blousing inside his chest, & when the light at dusk…
