Remainders
Jess Lacher
Three months after our house burned down, I bought Morgan a grocery store cake that said WELCOME HOME in green frosting. A candle was taped in the box lid and I slid that into my back pocket while I sliced…
On Roy Kesey’s Pacazo
Christian TeBordo
Dzanc Books: Westland, MI, 2011. 530 pages. $22.00. If you’ve spent significant time outside of your home country, you know it changes you—not just the way you talk, but the way you think. John Segovia, the California-born, Peruvian-emigrant narrator of…
Tuesday Night Rehearsal
Anne Kaier
I’m sitting in a metal chair, getting ready to sing Joseph Haydn’s lovely Saint Nicholas Mass with my community choir on the night the DC sniper is scheduled to die by lethal injection. Staring at the knotty pine walls of…
The Consolidation of Spaces
Chelsea Bolan
Snow. The first of the year. I pull on my boots and coat, walk through the streets made suddenly unfamiliar and find, with my toes, that particular edge where the road gives way to path. The path leads up from…
The Merchandise Mart
Inara Cedrins
I. Returning to Chicago after fourteen years, I sleep on the concrete floor of the studio at the Merchandise Mart with my sketch pad under me, drawings of yucca and orchids. The next day I walk, the smell of caramel…
All Happy Families: Kevin Wilson’s The Family Fang
Jensen Beach
Ecco Press: New York, NY, 2011. 320 pages. $23.00. The main characters of Kevin Wilson’s novel The Family Fang will draw the inevitable comparisons: Wes Anderson’s Tenenbaums, J.D. Salinger’s troubled and precocious Glass children. But The Family Fang is all…
Cavalcade
Christa Romanosky
Pyramids don’t share their mew, and no more
bridges can get me to you. Lost
without National Geographic, cubes of azaleas
set up shop, assassins drop by for iced coffee and read
daily horoscopes. We all complain too much
about the mist. What we’ve wanted, we’ve taken
…
Blind, in the Museum
Kathy Torma West
There was an accident in the photo lab behind the art studio and Livy went blind. The voice she heard when she woke up to the dark was Eli’s, the hand that slipped into hers, his. He told her the…
Behind the Sheets of Shuddering Cellophane
Mathias Svalina
I take my god
from the dust
on the windowsills,
from the blackened flesh
of the tumor
behind my father’s ear.
My god grows
snowy when
you turn the dial.
…
Daredevil
Colette Sartor
Every Sunday during Mass, Grace stared at little Noreen Baransky—at her swollen joints and wasted limbs, her bulging, watery eyes, the discolored fingernails. Grace wondered what was wrong with her. Maybe a rare chromosomal disorder with a complicated Latin name.…
an outline for the reconstruction of events; jeannie duval’s cheek tickled by a paris fly 1852; helpless (and in my mind I still need a place to go)
José Eugenio Sánchez
let’s say it was leipzig—long after mozart—
when the carriage pulled up to the gate
and someone blew a trumpet
…
Notes on Texture Notes by Sawako Nakayasu
Caryl Pagel
Letter Machine Editions: Tucson, AZ, 2010. 136 pages. $14.00. 9.15.11 Suppose the prose struck a pose—its figure held still until you tiled the mind’s interior with the objects of a mined field: a “field of flowers, field of gold, field…
Gretel
Judy Labensohn
House A. My upstairs neighbor heard voices in the walls. The voices called her at night, but she didn’t get their language. A light fixture fell in the hallway. She was told to shake sage in the corners, to open…
Connecting the Fragments: Kathleen Graber’s The Eternal City
Sarah C. Harwell
Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ, 2010. 96 pages. $16.95. In her second book, The Eternal City (2010 National Book Award Finalist), Kathleen Graber has written poems that acknowledge the existence of a fragmented world through quick cuts and unexpected associations,…
On Mark Richard’s House of Prayer No. 2: A Writer’s Journey Home
Jesse Donaldson
Nan A. Talese: New York, NY, 2011. 224 pages. $23.95. There is no negotiation in Mark Richard’s new memoir. Written in the second person singular, House of Prayer No. 2 forces its readers to inhabit a life that is not…
On James L. White’s The Salt Ecstasies
David Bartone
Graywolf Press: Minneapolis, MN, 2010. 96 pages. $15.00. James L. White’s last poems, The Salt Ecstasies, breathe so lonesome. They have the weight of elegiac gaze and the slow heat of youthful longing. “Salt me down where love was /…
Warrior’s Day
Connor Wroe Southard
Thin Lips wore the deathly charcoal green uniform of the People’s Army of Korea, and he boasted the vein-blood dark epaulets of an officer. If this were Seoul or Chicago, or a village in Devonshire or Saskatchewan instead of the…
Street Scene
Sejal Shah
Parisians call this neighborhood mixed. Mixed is code; it means immigrants. Think Brooklyn, Caitlin says. We are in the 20th Arrondissement, near Père Lachaise. I am here to see the Louvre and the Turkish Baths; I am here to visit…
Point and Line: Joseph Cardinale’s The Size of the Universe
Hilary Plum
Fiction Collective Two: Tuscaloosa, AL, 2010. 136 Pages. $13.50. According to E.M. Forster, what defines plot is causality. The queen does not merely die after the king, but dies of grief: the one event causes the other. In his debut…
The Wheel of History
Phong Nguyen
The wheel of history will run you over. —Khmer Rouge slogan Map History begins at 2:10 p.m. The chairs are attached to their desks, arranged in jagged rows from a full day’s use. The walls are blocks of peach stucco,…
Tributary
Kevin McLellan
The fire. It is a matter
of time. I belong
to the knives. And I
must have already.
My body will need
to surrender. Like spills…
Two Lungs
David Kutz-Marks
Outside the mine, I met a superb lyrebird.
He was bound to a slave and his song was the chain,
wind and glasses clinking in the dark.
Then a Russian girl from the Rathmines
came up and whispered her name, which I have forgotten,
long black hair locking hands with the tail of the bird.…
A Sestina for a Cannibal
Jeffrey Greene
How do you teach a cannibal
to speak when he has no tongue?
Draw a picture first—a house or a ship—
and then guide his fingers
to form the letters
and slowly pronounce the word.…
On Shann Ray’s American Masculine
Adam Parker Cogbill
Graywolf Press: Minneapolis, MN, 2011. 182 Pages. $15.00. Shann Ray’s first book, American Masculine, winner of the 2010 Bakeless Prize for Fiction, is a short story collection following in the Western tradition of writers like Cormac McCarthy and Annie Proulx.…
Way off the Water; Revelation
Weston Cutter
way off the water
nature will thread
narrative to whatever
needle yr glance casts:
…
