Thad Rutkowski/Hard Biking
HARD BIKING by Thaddeus Rutkowski It’s raining, and I’m on foot, heading for my parked bicycle, when I see a bike go by with two umbrellas attached to it. One umbrella is over the main rider, and the other is over the back wheel, as if to protect a small...
Merton as Mentor
With his Columbia University degrees in literature, including a master’s thesis on the poetry and imagery of the Romantic poet William Blake, his experience teaching at Columbia and at St. Bonaventure, and his many years teaching at Gethsemani—four years as master of scholastics and ten years as master of novices (frequently using literature in his classes)—Merton’s evaluation was also encouraging …
Jordan Blum/Editor Interview
A teacher or “expert” might say, “Good poetry must ____ and not contain ____,” for instance, or “Every story must _____.” To me, it’s good if I like it. I
George Preston Nelson, Poetry
Through the “Door to the River” I See AAA no Brechtian “earthquakes to come,’' only cool Coltranian chromatic riffs ascending/descending Giant Steps tween heaven and house, notes runnin-t-getha in clefs of black juice poured between strokes of the calligrapher’s...
William Wolak/Poetry & Collage
Unpredictable Pleasures You’re a shipwreck rusting into sand, but keep the wind’s sighing inside your tattered sails even when the world seems cold as a coffin’s white silk lining. Like the breathlessness of sparks, the unpredictable pleasures of love always...
Dante Distefano/Poetry
A gun rack tickles your ribcage when you
make love in the extended cab’s back seat.
You shoot the breeze with angels and sing hymns
that harmonize buckshot and wildflower.
Dio-genes Abreau/Poetry
you follow the vines,
the leafless branches that one day would die
knowing the joy gravitating between your arms
as body and soul come together in the same dance;
George Nelson Preston/How I Met Pablo Neruda
“Venceremos” was a cry that I constantly heard. Cuba was a beehive of armed citizens, milicianos and regulars. I knew of the invasion talk back home and I wondered how in the world a country armed in this fashion could be subdued. Little did I know that the debacle of the disastrously failed CIA sponsored beach-head at Bahia de Cochinos and La Cienega de Zapata would be a total route with Fidel himself commanding from the turret of a former Cuban Army battle tank.
R. B. Ejue/Fiction
She starts greeting you in your language, releasing throngs of words you cannot understand so that you become irritated. All this is unnecessary. You know she can speak English and so you don’t understand why she insists on speaking your language all the time. You ignore her and walk away, hoping that your conduct puts her off, but she is unfazed, tipping the taxi driver and carrying your two traveling bags into the house, the smile on her face ever present.
Darren Demaree/Poetry
EMILY AS A DEER HEART I put my teeth to Emily. I left an identifiable impression there. All crimes committed amidst that mythology will carry my name with them. This season, I hunted so lazily & since I could not take a bite of her with me, I knew that I would...
Tom Bradley/Fiction
Father Itchy-Nookie lurks simultaneously in all the crannies of this catacomb, his clutch purse brimming with transubstantial gore — Sam knows this without separating either seizured sets of eyelids. To the assembled expatriate congregation, Hiroshima’s chief attorney of nothingness dispenses wads of gristle and scab, flopping them greasily from the chipped rim of a crude ceramic chalice. And, unlike Sam’s present interlocutor, the wads are not even properly cooked.
John L. Stanizzi/Poetry
WALMART The knuckled trailer park rests in topsy repose on a plinth of ledge beside paltry little Windham Airport whose main function is flying people up so they can skydive down, and where every now and then at dusk a Cessna’s vesper whispers across the wide sky...
Alan Britt/Poetry
PLANTING A SEED (For many people) In the back room with Van Morrison. In the back room. In the back of the back room with Duckett & Beaz, back somewhere below purple azaleas, on our backs & on the back of a B&O retiree's gold-plated swan song. In the...
8 Books Worth A Look/Reviews
Queen Kong by Amanda J. Bradley 88 Pages, 7 x 10 Library of Congress Control Number: 2017930503 ISBN: 978-1-63045-038-0 Anticipated Publication Date: April 24,, 2017 Cover Illustration by Mikayla Lewis by Emily Vogel, Poetry Editor Much of classic feminist theory...
Linda C. Wisniewski/Fiction
Now Helen lifted the lamp, surprised by its weight. She needed two hands to wrestle it into the box. A sharp stabbing in her lower back made her cry out but no one was there to hear her. She got down on her knees and rubbed at her back with both hands, tears filling her eyes.
Damn you, Ed. You knew I hated this ugly thing. Twenty years I put up with it, twenty years of parties, all those embarrassing moments when our guests walked up to it, peering at the garish colors, then at me, a question in their eyes.
Peter Thabit Jones/Poetry
HERON: MONTEREY WHARF, CALIFORNIA Heron, hunchbacked, Drab chapel-grey, Bedraggled loner, Still as a statue On guard, staring Away and stood In a calmness Perfected since birth. What is a moment In unbothered composure? The ridiculous legs, The ungainly posture, The...
Catharine Lucas/Poetry
AFTERMATH Big Sur, California, May 2009 Phosphorescent green flickers against wet dark, fire in another tongue Memorials of trees, stripped bare, black as mummies, stand witness Leaf-laden alders, parchment ghosts, testify in blanched whispers Our dead...
Alita Pirkopf/Poetry
TEAHO-- USE IN THE JAPANESE GARDEN The young man and the ancient Japanese flute make sounds like breath and wind, like rain and river, make sounds that soar—like birds— sounds that sing— toward evening’s silence, sounds we are told, of water dripping— from the...
Donna Vitucci/An excerpt from “Salt of Patriots”
On this first of September, sundown rushed a draft through the practice area. Patrice pulled her papa’s old grey sweater closer. The rest of the singers had been little more than acquaintances; she immediately forgave them their small-mindedness. And she and Agnes had shared nothing beyond Thanksgiving dinner, walks home in the dark, giggles, and naïve, girlish dreams. Patrice had been caring for her mother while other girls learned the tricks to making and keeping friends. Another way in which her mother had robbed her.
Caitlin Garvey/Poetry
Illustration from Iconographie Des Cactees (1841-1847) by Charles Antoine Lemaire
Marc Vincenz/Interview
On the surface, few believe that change can occur through rhetoric or wordplay and yet, a critical mass appears to be as easily swayable today as they were during the rise of the Communist parties of China or the Soviet Union or the National Socialist Party of Germany—or even more recent brain-scrubbers like Sun Myung Moon and L. Ron Hubbard. Public figures and media addicts somehow manage to float on even the flimsiest of logic. In the end it appears that it is emotion that sways a populace. How else could millions follow the obvious maniacal rants of a rug-headed, ineloquent narcissist whose family rechristened themselves after a deceptive playing card?
Tim Walker/Creative Nonfiction
Dana enters the aviary carefully, closing the door behind him. The plover chicks, alert but unafraid, watch him with eyes like obsidian beads. He strews a handful of hoppers on the floor for the chicks to chase down. A few hoppers escape through the aviary’s mesh, and Cris’s free-range chickens snap them up. Like the snowies, the chickens have been watching us and waiting for our bounty of juicy arthropods.
Carl Auerbach/Poetry
EXILE The word bird does not itself take flight from ..........off .................the ........................page. nor do the letters robin insert their beak deep into the field of white between the text to impale a small wet worm. We are torn from being by...
Julieanna Blackwell/Fiction
She did not fumble with a card and a detached machine. Instead, she handed him a five, establishing a degree of contact, even if only through a piece of paper. He took the bill, tapped the keys on his register, forcing open the drawer. She held out her palm, spreading long fingers wrinkled and scarred by the echoing shapes of flames that once danced across her skin.
Catherine Lucas/Poetry
AFTERMATH Big Sur, California, May 2009 Phosphorescent green flickers against wet dark, .............fire in another tongue Memorials of trees, stripped bare, black as ............mummies, stand witness Leaf-laden alders, parchment ghosts, testify...