Bill Dixon/From the Edge

Bill Dixon/From the Edge

Everyone develops a system of rationalizing their more aberrant behavioral issues, I suppose, and I have developed mine. I don’t watch much television. (Here comes the rationalization)….In Maine, I don’t have any means of doing so: no cable, no antenna, and absolutely no interest in turning on the tube even if I had the means to do so. Accordingly, for nearly six months out of the year, I don’t watch any TV at all − as in none!

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Karen Fayeth/Fiction

Karen Fayeth/Fiction

  The Seal     by Karen Fayeth     Amid the noise of family chatter around the dinner table, Sakari ate quietly and took small bites while her little brother, Nattiq, scooped mounds of fermented fish into his face. “Slow down,” she quietly...

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Lyn Lifshin/Poetry

Three Poems   APRIL, PARIS     Nothing would be less shall we call it what it is, a cliché than April in Paris. But this poem got started with some thing I don’t think I could do but it reminded me of Aprils and then...

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David Williams/Poetry

David Williams/Poetry

 Two Poems   Loving Backwards   “Me me me” is what Dad says, “me is all you think about and you are selfish.” I forget what I did. Dad works hard all the time. I always say I'm sorry. Then I am sorry.   He does not have time to...

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Joseph H. Lindsley, 1920-2015

Joseph H. Lindsley, 1920-2015

Joe’s presence was a godsend to many directionless youth seeking someone who would listen to them without being judgmental. If anything, he was the ultimate encourager, listening, sharing, reinforcing the natural and native inclinations, and creativity, of those he knew. The constancy in his own work, and the encouragement he provided others to pursue their own dreams and creative urges, were a cure for their insecurity, and perhaps even his own best medicine for what sometimes must have been an ailing spirit. But spirited he was, and that’s how he is remembered here.

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Sidney Thompson/Fiction

Sidney Thompson/Fiction

“I have a fourteen-year-old daughter,” said Jimmy. His jaws flexed and his face flamed red, the headmaster’s exact reaction, until he broke character and laughed. He glanced down at Cooper’s paperwork. “I don’t need to read any of this. ‘Penis,’ that’s priceless! Their mouths dropped open, huh? Just involuntary?”

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A World Series to Remember

A World Series to Remember

It’s the beginning of the sixth inning. Now the left-handed, 35-year-old Yankee batter Hideki Matsui, known as “Gorilla,” a native of Japan, steps up to the plate. His nickname was originally a derisive nickname given on account of a skin condition, subsequently elevated to honorific on account of his skill with the bat. Matsui doesn’t chew or spit, just coolly raises his bat and quietly looks his opponent in the eye, like a brave Samurai.

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Blood Sport/Steve Bromberg

Blood Sport/Steve Bromberg

The smell of death lingers on the savannah. Big Game hunting is a sight to behold. It’s the ultimate expression of the hunter’s feelings of alienation and inadequacy and his frustration with interpersonal relationships. Now, with the discovery of the illegal killing of Zimbabwe’s beloved lion Cecil, “sport” killing has become a searing hot topic.

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Ben Myers/Poetry

 Three Poems   BENEDICTION: For My Father   In the gravel driveway beside the house of peeling paint there is a motorcycle, but it does not belong to you. The bike is black, a dragon painted on its gas tank, tail entwining a...

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Phyllis Carol Agins/Fiction

Phyllis Carol Agins/Fiction

THE ALTAR     by  Phyllis Carol Agins   ella knows what she is running from. One failed marriage, two dramatic love affairs. A third abortion that was almost too late when she might be...

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The Bard and the Bud

The Bard and the Bud

Did Shakespeare Get the Munchies AAA While Writing About Sex?  “As luck would have it, a pirate named Ragozine, of similar appearance to Claudio, has recently died of a fever, so his head is sent to Angelo instead.” Measure for...

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Remembering Nick Kolumban

Remembering Nick Kolumban

And then he went on telling me how much fun he had had later on that afternoon that stretched into the evening and the night in the company of other poets and artists, a real bunch of bohemians. When I pulled out an envelope from my pocket, stuffed with six or seven of my surrealist masterpieces, he looked at it as if I were serving him with summons to appear in court. I assured him it only contained my poems, he nodded in reluctant assent and stowed the wrinkled package in a thin paperback book he had in his hand. But then he changed his mind and shoved the book in my face.

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Jeffrey C. Alfier/Poetry

Farm Near a Bend in River Tummel   There was a shed here once. If you look close, you can see grass ghosting its outline.   Any tool the day required could be found here. Tack, as well: bits, bridles, a harness or two....

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Writers on Writing

Writers on Writing

One might say that autobiography, excepting the words the cortex finds to arrange its memories, is in some sense a product of the limbic brain. And that the limbic brain is therefore the chief culprit behind what so many seem to think is the current glut of memoirs.

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Saramanda Swigart/Fiction

She listened until she could hear the objects in the room hum. The gilt plates, impressed with hunting scenes from the Shahnameh, hummed a rich bass. The archeologists had gasped when they saw she’d set the table with them. They’d put on their gloves so the oil from their hands wouldn’t touch the gold, and rushed them back to her father’s study, and closed the glass over them.

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Bookstores of New York

Bookstores of New York

The prognosis for the future is mixed in Uptown Manhattan. Among the last of the independents on the Upper West Side is Book Culture, at 536 West 112th, around the corner from the gates of Columbia University and down the block from the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. The store has long leaned to the scholarly, but the academic book business is in a slump, given the dwindling number of students applying to and pursuing Ph.D.s in the humanities. In business since 1997, owner Chris Doeblin decided to diversify. In 2009 he opened a new store, Book Culture on Broadway, that also carries “non-book,” i.e. scarves, toys, and knickknacks, along with more popular titles. But sales in the main store are declining. Doeblin ascribes the sorry state of affairs at least in part to an industry at odds with itself…

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Savage Mountain/John Smelcer

Savage Mountain/John Smelcer

Sebastian wasn’t sure what to do. He couldn’t just climb back up to the top. Once he stood on the crest, his brother’s weight would pull him off the north side of the mountain. He certainly couldn’t cut the rope. Sebastian slowly formed a plan and began climbing toward the top of the crest. When he was close, he hammered a piton into the rock face and connected himself to it with a carabiner and a short piece of rope; anchored that way, he couldn’t be dragged off the other side.

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86 Sonnets/Book Review

86 Sonnets/Book Review

I was attracted to the title of this new poetry collection by Mary Barnet, the Founder/Editor of poetrymagazine.com because I know how difficult it is to write sonnets and admit giving up on them and concentrating on other forms — the triolet, villanelle, and pantoum…

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Then and Now/Steve Poleskie

Then and Now/Steve Poleskie

The historically cold winter has finally left us. As it’s warmer now, we have the windows open; no air conditioning for our 150-year-old farmhouse. One thing my wife and I dislike about Florida is the need to have one’s air-conditioner cranked up all year long. Living on the side of a hill and having twenty acres of woods and fields, surrounded by a 700 acre state park, we enjoy having the windows up to let in a fresh breeze. Unfortunately, the open windows also let in the noise…

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After Birth/Book Review

After Birth/Book Review

Another day gone, okay and I get it, I got it: I’m over. I no longer exist,” says Ari, the sometimes blunt, always quirky narrator of After Birth, a first novel from Elisa Albert. Throughout the novel, Ari struggles with her identity, now that she is no longer single, and no longer pregnant, but a mother…

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Tony Magistrale/Poetry

A Short Treatise on Time “There are days when the fear of death illuminates everything.”           —Ted Kooser I’m weary of bemoaning so many lost hours,   as if we ever had any choice other than a one-way ticket with a time-stamp securely...

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