Stephen Kaplan/Poetry

    THE TROLLEY CAR     All the windows broken snow drifted into the interior. Some demon had left it on six feet of track some seventy years ago. Demons function efficiently during the winter.   It was seen and not seen. When eyes walked past...

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Tim Suermondt/Poetry

  RAY   It’s absurd to say we’ll live forever but just as absurd to say we won’t— the angels sitting on the treetops have a purpose, whether they be real or not. The Irish bar has been closed down but if a man or woman were to look inside they’d see us both...

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N. David Pastor/Poetry

      “Dotage”   Aging gracefully, With an eye for dementia   I recognize celestial impotence Floating in my soup.   The architecture to scale, Yet somehow out of proportion.   My creator, a diminutive man Spilling forth in an...

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Gina Larkin/Poetry

    AT THE SALON     Magazine pages filled with products to volumize, customize, hydrolosize, defrizz. Almost as any pages as are devoted to organizing the closet that stores the bottles and pumps and tubes of promise. The stylist runs her fingers...

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Festival Notebooks/Book Review

Festival Notebooks/Book Review

A certain place at the festival, and in the heart of poetry lovers, belongs to a group of poets and writers of Romanian origins who frequent the Residence. They found their own voice in Canadian and Romanian literature, some of them being consecrated and others less-known, still modelling their style.

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Karen Schubert/Fiction

Karen Schubert/Fiction

The blueberry ginger muffins were still warm, so I’d left the basket uncovered. I was balancing it and a thermos of coffee with one hand, using the other to get around a box that was nearly wide and long as the entryway. I called halloooo! Lee came in with a handful of socks, dropped a shot glass into each one, and stuffed them into the enormous box between a bag of rice, a rag rug and a few couch pillows…

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Mollie McNeil/Fiction

I want to say I have a lot of brothers inside with sharp knives and baseball bats, but I can’t. I’m no good at lying. Pluto should bite him, but he just thumps his tail on the concrete pavement like we are old pals. More tears stream down my face. I can’t stop them.

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Dió-genes Abréu/Poetry

      THIS NEGRO   This negro doesn’t speak of rivers, I speak of Haitian children whipped by misery and denied a nationality;   this negro doesn’t speak of rivers, there are other currents marking the cartography of this map we call Republic;...

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Diner Stories/Book Review

Diner Stories/Book Review

    Diner Stories: Off the Menu Edited by Daniel McTaggart         Mountain State Press Inc., Charleston, WV, 25304 www.mountainstatepress.org Order from Amazon.com ISBN: 978-0-941092-71-5 Published in 2015 234 pages, 6” x 9”, Paperback,...

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João Cerqueira/Fiction

João Cerqueira/Fiction

“The majority of mankind seems to believe in something more than chemical transformations,” Jesus said.

“Have you ever known anyone to rejoice in death?”

“The death of a human being almost always causes suffering to family and friends…”

“Couldn’t it be that they suspect that there’s nothing after that?” Magdalene asked.

“What’s the point in living if you believe in nothing?”

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Miriam O’Neal/Poetry

  One Reading of the Contraband of the Hoopoe     requires a suspension of disbelief, new, unpredictable logic, journeys, tones of bells, strings, and drums, bodies frozen, bodies in motion, many birds, always the hoopoe   sometimes the editorial...

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Cheyenne Dorsagno/Poetry

People I Knew   1   When I first met you, your shirt was striped – fat purple, thin black, medium pink, white too! No pattern, varying thicknesses. “I like your shirt,” I said. That was a lie.   You said there was a dead body buried in your front yard...

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Tonya K. Dale/Creative Nonfiction

Tonya K. Dale/Creative Nonfiction

I know why the dog next door cries at night. He’s the black-and-white mutt, the shaggy prisoner of a fenced-in portico…four feet by four feet. Cement floor.
No one is home, usually, where he lives, except for him. And so he talks to himself, and me, and the other neighbors.

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Peter Krok/Poetry

    Looking For His Mind     How many times did he tell himself, "This too shall pass?" How many times did he fall into darkness where his glasses did no good? He keeps falling, heavy with questions. The Master asks, "Where are you going?" "I am...

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BOOK REVIEWS

BOOK REVIEWS

Gabriel: A Poem
by Edward Hirsch

True Love Scars
by Michael Goldberg

Fire Road
by Barbara Siegel Carlson

Life Is Perfect
by Amy Small-McKinney

Uncontested Grounds
by William Conelly

Hidden Dangers: Mexico on the Brink of Disaster
by Robert Joe Stout

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DIRT/Fiction

DIRT/Fiction

All eyes were on Miss McBride whose smile split down the middle, so that it looked like she had two faces glued together. While the right side kept a tight grip on bliss, the right eye held up by a twitching wall of muscle, the left eye sank into its socket, drowning in a pool of tears, the sadness spilling down the cheek that collapsed beneath it in an avalanche of skin…

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Austin International Poetry Festival

Austin International Poetry Festival

We’re very pleased to present the work of three featured poets scheduled to read at the 23rd Austin International Poetry Festival: Allyson Whipple, Candy Royalle and Christopher Carmona. The festival’s headline poet this year is Nikki Giovanni, who will read April 11. Giovanni’s performance is open to the public…

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Stephanie Golisch/CNF

Stephanie Golisch/CNF

Blue Eyes slinkily stares me down like he’s caught me shoplifting and he’s going to let me walk out of his store with whatever I want. His impish grin is like callused hands tickling my neck. I immediately tell myself I’m imagining things. I’m the sweatiest, smelliest and most disheveled I’ve ever been in my life…

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Jeannine Hall Gailey/Poetry

 ---------------------------- 5 Poems by Jeannine Hall Gailey   Oak Ridge is a Mystery It cannot be penetrated because of the dark leaves of the oaks and maples, standing so close you can hear them whisper, “Keep out.” The carpet of needles beneath your feet,...

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Fiction/Kristen Clanton

Fiction/Kristen Clanton

Before she was found beneath the interstate, her face half-missing, her body stripped clean, except for the fingers with their golden rings, Destiny’s mother stayed busy. It was in the audience of men…

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Lyn Lifshin/Poetry

   LIPS   Yours, honey, were so perfect, a little rosebud mouth, not those puffed up blubbery things, my mother says when I pointed out the models’ collagen petals. “Roses,” my mother always says, “That’s what yours were, a nice tiny nose. That’s from...

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