“Arlene never married Lars because some things are better left unsaid. He asked until the time for asking was over. She didn’t want anyone else, but she didn’t want him on her couch after 7:30 at night.”
Sunday morning, / he is hard / at worship / in the divine / church of golf. / His most / ardent prayer, / his heavenly gaze / comes down / to this tough putt / on the 7th green.
“I nod but I really don’t feel so good. I am cold through and through and when I look out the car window at the snow I see trees move when they do not. I am experiencing Death all around me and I cannot move.”
“Because I could not see what she saw, / I invented the burning city that gives no heat, / I planted the pillar of salt that is no resource, / And now, as their shadows wave at my feet, / I imagine the horrified look she gave / And salvage her look that has turned from me.”
But how to be in a world gone mad. / Not to be is easy. / Simply climb a willow tree, / reach for what you cannot have, / and fall from grace.
“It’s just half an hour, / it’s just a marriage, just a week’s worth of sex, it’s just / easier to move my thumb along the screen protector / like it’s tender, it’s just grief after grief after / your kid at a baseball game after grief after gif / after grief”
“We take turns, but Alison is a cat. She has a gray jumpsuit that she keeps for this purpose. In the video that we reenact, I am sitting on the couch with a glass of water watching a show. Alison is surreptitious and likes to take her time relaxing into her approach. When she is in her jumpsuit I know that she is not Alison, or even Alison playing the role of a cat. She is a cat.”
“Two girls among the green, between trees. Hands on hips, heads tipped back, eyes searching sky. Six years before Taylor Swift announced her eighth studio album by posting a photo of herself standing in a forest, she posted another photo of a forest holding two women, which she has since deleted from her grid. Don’t stress, it’s not gone. It’s just entered the next stage in the celebrity Instagram life cycle, which means that it’s truly ours now, property of the stans with the prescience to preserve.”
“the kingdom comes like a joke / told by a child, littered with /
what do you get and what happens now / and how many how many how many / like a game / of lost and found”
Our Fall/Winter 2019 issue features new fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, with photographs by Sophie Barbasch.
Contributors: E. Kristin Anderson, Derek Annis, Shayne Barr, Jennifer Blackman, Kate Brittain, Mary Byrne, Bill Cheng, Bryna Cofrin-Shaw, Ani Sison Cooney, Sergei Dovlatov, Michael Ray Ferlazzo, Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry, Irving A. Greenfield, Iris Hanika, Kent Haruf, Gabe Hudson, Lisa Ludden, Lincoln Michel, Henry Mills, Celeste Mohammed, Jason Porter, Molly Quinn, Tomasz Różycki, Kaleigh Spollen, Seema Srivastava, Grace Talusan, John Wray
with translations by Yasha Klots & Ross Ufberg, Mira Rosenthal, and Abigail Wender
Our Fall/Winter 2018 issue features new fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, with illustrations by Vincent Le.
Contributors: David Albahari, Karen Bender, Eugene Brogyányi, Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello, Lisa Chen, Ellen Elias-Bursać, Nick Fuller Googins, Paulette Guerin, János Háy, Suzanne Highland, Christopher Kang, Michelle Har Kim, Pingmei Lan, Eric Laster, Vincent Le, Yukiko Motoya, Dennis Pahl, Sam Pink, Brynne Rebele-Henry, Evan Gill Smith, José Watanabe, Asa Yoneda
