Maddie Clevenstine – Ask Me About Hell
Ask Me About Hell There is something standing in the street. With sharp teeth and hands made of metal, it paces the edges of the neighborhood. Sometimes it wears the face of my mother, other times my uncle long dead and buried turned to marsh and twigs in the dirt. Still other times it wears […]
Carine Topal – What Are You Looking At?
What are You Looking At? You are looking at a beating heart. Red Square, the front yard of rulers, named for its loveliness. You are looking at a plaza of lock-stepping uniforms and a few demonstrators. And tourists. Above them, the minarets of St. Basil’s, its onion domes disquieted by a huddle of limping babushkas […]
Michael Spring – hospital walls, 3am
hospital walls, 3am (after the pulmonary embolism) the walls are made of wings rustling inside the white paint my wife is asleep in a foldout chair in the corner of the room my body is sunk into pillows facing a dark TV screen – a black mirror – I watch myself and her and all […]
Mara Lee Grayson – Cross-Country Hydatidiform
Cross-Country Hydatidiform Passing thoughts: Knife first, then turtle shell. Brown cow rubs white face against a fence. Woman, almost middle aged and ill situated there as any oil well in nameless green rurality, both dense and spare: if not lost, she is alone for words among the cluster trees that leave her feather-tongued and prickly […]
Catherine Gonick – Sister Mary Joseph Serves Lunch in Ávila
Sister Mary Joseph Serves Lunch in Ávila Fierce Mother Teresa and quiet Juan, her much younger, but equally powerful protégé, can’t stop themselves from levitating like thousand-layer cakes raised by inner fires when they talk of God. Bearing trays of steaming sancocho I see them as I pass on my way to the refectory where […]
