Mary Butcher
Jess Lacher
There are days, over the baby crying, when I still think I hear Mary Butcher calling from the broken-out basement windows of the ranch house at the end of the cul-de-sac. I tell myself that this is impossible but when…
From Diary of Age (Imerologio tis ilikias)
Karen Emmerich
Stillness Is the surrounding by silence Of a low land Whose still-insatiable age Lies deeply in wait —Against the attraction of another planet— There where the older works sank Into its body And those works Isolated dangers from other eras…
On Her Having Arrived
Hannah Sanghee Park
He thickets in. He thickens. The AA meeting ran late: he brandished a BB gun and the cops were called. Shot ten CC’s of something slowing in him. Type AB blood, type A personality, B.A. in French: this only goes one way…
Diving
Natalie Sypolt
Today is Thanksgiving and Maggie and Mom are peeling potatoes. They cube and drop them into a pan of murky water that sits between them on the table. Mom’s potatoes are smooth and white. Maggie’s are chopped and little specks…
Death Threat
Megan Anderegg Malone
She knew it was serious when she saw her father strap the gun belt over his pinstriped shirt in the morning as he was getting ready for work. Guns were nothing unusual in their house—Robin’s mother often joked that the…
Listened
Charles reached across the seat of the cab to cover his wife’s dry hand with his own. The knuckles of it were tensed and he felt the ridges there. “When was the last time we saw the McClaines?” his wife…
Salt
Christopher Feliciano Arnold
There were three of us kids, so during those last days, when Dad felt cramped with all of us staring at him, Mom scheduled time for everyone to be alone with him a few minutes. The twins went in together…
Review of The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing
Dan Chelotti
Kevin Young, Ed. Bloomsbury: New York, NY, 2010. 311 pages. $24.00. Elias Canetti once argued that “without a new attitude toward death nothing worthwhile can be said regarding life.” Standing at nearly three-hundred pages, Kevin Young’s anthology attempts to answer…
Paris Fashion Notes from Monsieur Sans-Chic, or Lookin’ for a Look in the Land of Good Lookin’, with a Short Diatribe in Defense of the Man-Purse
Dan Laskin
As a man of the mind, I have always disdained fashion. So superficial, n’est-ce pas? So much fluttering about ephemeral frippery. What falsity, this passion for surface, when essence is what counts. This stance has served me quite well, given…
Excerpts from Lunar Savings Time
Alex Epstein
Translated from Hebrew by Becka Mara McKay On the Power of Russian Literature My great-grandmother once shut a book by Tolstoy so hard that a spark came from its pages, and the spark climbed up the curtains, and ignited a…
Benjamin Percy’s The Wilding
Alexander Yates
Graywolf Press: Minneapolis, MN, 2010. 288 pages. $23.00. In the tradition of Deliverance—and with an epigraph from the same—comes Benjamin Percy’s tense debut novel, The Wilding. Like James Dickey’s classic, this is a story about men adventuring through a menacing…
Operations of Mind: Sarah Gridley’s Green is the Orator, John Cross’s Staring at the Animal, and Lance Phillips’s These Indicium Tales
Jay Thompson
Green is the Orator. Sarah Gridley. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010. 104 pp. $19.95. The word for Green is the Orator, Sarah Gridley’s second book of poems, is not collection, but miscellany—a word that catches the baroque, eighteenth-century-like…
Lingerie
James Midgley
I love you because you remind me of somebody else. In heels; in a babydoll; wearing only my old shirt. We are taking a holiday from the real world. On the balcony a mantis is caught in half the burlap…
Cosmos Revealed Behind a Dense Curtain of Poppies
Tung-Hui Hu
And each plant has an equivalent star in the sky: to read leaves as pages of starcharts, to navigate by leaf of acanthus! O lovers, swear not by the inconstant light of the olive tree. Feed each other madder root…
Why We Must Have Canonical Hours and Islands
Elizabeth T. Gray Jr.
Iona To resist the hollowing, difficult to bear, that draws us across an expanse of sea or year to meet, in winter, on a narrow stair, a desolation folded in a cowl of wool or winged lions at the edges…
A Temporary Fix
Joseph Fazio
The service bell rang. Wesley looked up from his book and saw a silver hatchback gliding to a stop in the gas station island. Steam rose from the front of the car, and two short, shirtless men with skin the…
I’m an Old Cowhand
M. Chase Colton
One road led away from Dalton and I was on it—washboard red dirt narrowed by unkempt wheat growth. About five miles back on farm-road 196 the rotted-oak electric poles laid flat. The town sign, full of buckshot, read: Dalton, OK,…
Algorithms
John Allman
Final State It’s not what you did in the third grade exactly—reciting theory and shepherd letter by letter in the class spelling bee—arriving at the word beyond any doubt, or even going backwards in what later you’d call heuristic, as…
Nothing in Nature
Christian C. Thompson
On a fall afternoon walking across a field in Concord Emerson was not oblivious to the colors of the leaves yet his response was dull, without connection between his mood and the world—nothing in nature was equivalent to his indifference—…
Wonder Woman Explains the Act of Contrition to Ophelia
Christian Teresi
Dear child, sometimes being good is a pretty sad song. When columbine and daisy color your bouquet all you’ll shortly be holding are dead things. You begin with pity the same way a priest begins with prayer. Your allegiance is…
Lab Report
Rose Swartz
Experiment for Combating the Disorder Commonly Known as “Being in Love with the Idea of Being in Love” Introduction/Purpose: Being in love with the idea of being in love is a tired game. The old voodoo of mix tapes crackling…
The Snake
Brian Swann
green, hunting, long as my bootlace, thumb-thick, whips in front across the path, a flick, a curl like the Pueblo sign for flowing water, renewing rain, lightning, so fast it isn’t there, but green, green as the beans in cans…
Review of Atsuro Riley’s Romey’s Order
Jason Schneiderman
University of Chicago Press: Chicago, IL, 2010. 54 pages. $14.00. Atsuro Riley’s debut collection draws its energy from the collision of an outsider’s strangeness with the deep slang of an insider. His language is a dark mirror of the regional…
Ventrakl: Georg Trakl Redubbed for the Twenty-first Century
Dan Rosenberg
Ventrakl. Christian Hawkey. Brooklyn, NY: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010. 152 pp. $17. Christian Hawkey’s fourth collection—the brilliant “scrapbook” Ventrakl—genre-mashes like mad, combining photographs, poems (as translations, imitations, adaptations), faux interviews, and essays. This polyvalent dossier creates an imaginative space from…
Five Skull Diadem, TSONG KHAPA’S PRAISE OF THE INNER YAMA
Dana Levin
at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art 1 Because you believe in your skin, you must elect the knife. Peel the hair, the scalp-skin down. Bow to the fruit-bearing crown. • • When someone asked Rinzai to define the…
The Wife
Julie Iromuanya
On the driest days of Harmattan, the sky rains sand. On such days, the wives collectively battle against the storm, stuffing rags into cracks of doorways and leaking thatched roofs. When it is time to draw well water, from a…
