#53: Poetry by Shreya Vikram
PRAYER TO THE TILES ON MY BEDROOM FLOOR Once, I hated you. Once, I wished for your softer cousins, toothless spreads. Once, I wanted things you denied me: the brush of cloth on my feet. Worship. Submission. Apology. You have waited me out. Made me feel things: bones, shifting like a sack of stones, my […]
#52: Fiction by Linda Caradine
BROTHER JOHN We was country. That’s why when Mamma and Daddy Pete had John, we knowed he was special. He had him a light bright color and good hair. He didn’t look nothing like the rest of the Tillman kids. We were sure he would be knowed as more than just one of the big […]
#51: Nonfiction by Michael Silverman
NEWARK As I waited for the garbage to be emptied into a truck, I was with a group of young men waiting to be taken through the same entrance to learn our fate. Would we be serving in the armed forces of the United States? Why was a 23-year-old graduate student standing on this filthy […]
#50: Nonfiction by Aakriti Karun
TOUCHING I once heard that the oldest parts of the brain associate themselves with ritual. On default, the primitive brain relapses, in some beastly instinct, the animal overwhelming the human with something as mundane as routine. You, the host, are responsible for crafting the ritual, but you cannot be blamed for giving in. Can you? […]
#49: Poetry by Cecil Morris
A KIND OF APOLOGY When you rise and the streetlight leaking in catches you, your hair swinging down, your breasts shifting, I hear the tumbling piano notes of Weekend Edition and think of Liederman finding them after years of wandering through plenitude of possibilities, how he must have felt the rightness, the beauty, the way […]
#48: Fiction by Geoffrey Polk
PAWNSHOPS, DAYLIGHT MOONS “Joe and I are getting married,” my mother said. We were making spaghetti, the two of us. I was opening cans for her, getting out plates and napkins, the bottle of no-year wine. I was divorced. She was a widow. We were statistics standing in her underlit kitchen. “Tuxes, limos, flower girls?” […]
#47: Poetry by Russell Thorburn
WILLIE HORTON DRESSED IN HIS BASEBALL UNIFORM, AFTER PLAYING THE YANKEES AT TIGER STADIUM His home run lifted up over the fence to beat the Yankees in the second game of a doubleheader that afternoon, but the rioters won’t listen to him standing on top of his luxury car; the boy who learned baseball was […]
#46: Poetry by Rodney Torreson
Dreams Should Not Dog Great Center Fielders who come in from the pasture. Dreams should be pets gone fat. In nightmares Mantle is cramped, broad-shouldered, in a taxi, hungry as Mutt, his father, who pitched his free time to get Mick a ticket from the mines. He’s late for the game, always. And DiMaggio […]
#45: Fiction by Philip Brunetti
AUGUST OFF He had to have August off. This was necessary. He had summer savage in his blood—il salavaggio. He couldn’t go to work. He couldn’t be in an office, a cubicle, facing a computer screen. The death sentence of clicks. *** He had to have August off. He wanted to get drunk on the […]
#44: Nonfiction by Will Brooks
KING OF DIRT Just the appearance of the truck made me feel dirty. The grubby yellow paint gave little hint to the fact that the truck had started out white. I walked around the truck, being careful to stay upwind. On the driver’s side door was a trail of what looked like dried dirty water, […]