Story
Afro-Surreal Excerpt
D. Scot Miller
Let me tell you how I met Sham Black.
West Virginia, Dunbar Jr. High School football field, 123rd Annual Commode Bowl, Riverside Rats versus The Hillside Rams.
photograph by Kym Ghee
Every Thanksgiving morning...
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Story
The Year of Our Lord Quetzalcoatl
Margarita Shalina
The morning of the first day in the Dark Zone, I wake, still dreaming in black and white. I am Joan Crawford. I am Mildred Pierce. In the black of night, a storm is raging. I am in a bungalow by the ocean. The white foam wav...
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Poem
Plants at Work
Lynn McGee
Plants at Work
Sunflowers bob on a raft near Chernobyl,
roots leaching atoms humming with intent
to harm, but diffusing like sugar in the slow
surge of some big flower’s stalk,
its face tilting to follow the s...
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Poem
Two Poems by Rebecca Weiner Tompkins
Rebecca Weiner Tompkins
AFTER YOU SAID I ALWAYS LOSE THINGS
The red birthstone fell
out of my ring, leaving
its crowned prongs empty,
a perfect chip chiseled
from my heart’s bones.
I dreamed being stopped by
the long dark walkway
w...
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Essay
Vladislav Khodasevich: Midlife Meltdown in Paris
Jenny Wade
During the unusually hot Parisian summer of 1924, 38-year-old Vladislav Khodasevich—regarded by Nabokov as the finest Russian poet since Blok—was suffering from an identity crisis. One of 3 million exiled from Soviet Rus...
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Story
The Earring
Alan Kaufman
I first saw the gold crescent of renegade freedom dangling from the lobe of a nameless hairy hippy Goy, his scrawny, insolent neck bound by a red bandanna. He leaned with outthrust hip of impertinent American coolness agains...
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Evergreen
Ballad of a Lousy Husband
Joshua Mohr
I should probably tell you more about the night Blue pushed me off the bar because that was really when our marriage ended. Sure, we stayed together another nine, twelve, maybe fifteen months more, but nothing was ever goo...
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Writing
The World of Wrestling
Roland Barthes
The grandiloquent truth of gestures
on life's great occasions.
--Baudelaire
The virtue of all-in wrestling is that it is the spectacle of excess. Here we find a grandiloquence which must have been that of ancient th...
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Story
Caravaggio, Baby
Deborah Pintonelli
I have a date with Henry Henderson. We worked together one long summer canvassing for Greenpeace. Yes, I was one of those annoying young people who stop you on the street when you are rushing to your next appointment. He was...
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Poem
Silent Calls: Short Poems from Sparrow
Sparrow
Silent Calls
You know how sometimes the phone rings and when you answer it no one’s there? Many of those calls are made by cats.
Science Virgin
“I’m a science virgin,” said Adele. “I’ve n...
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Story
1971
Celia Farber
Anyway I had a goldfish, a common Woolworth’s goldfish, which I brought home in a water filled plastic bag, and somebody, a man named Rick, I think, who worked for my father, said it would be safe to place him in a concret...
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Story
Gladyss of the Hunt
Arthur Nersesian
“Gladyss! Turn on the TV, quick!”
“Hold on!” I muttered, having just been awakened from a sound sleep.
Assuming it had something to do with my murder case, which my brother knew I was assigned to, I pu...
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Interview
You Can Win: An Interview with Díre McCain
Edward S. Robinson
Díre McCain is a survivor. Editor in Chief at the internationally-renowned Paraphilia Magazine, which has, since its inception in 2009, built a reputation for writing and art of outstanding quality while existing far beyond...
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Story
Tambourine Man: Gene Clark – Part 13
Drew Hubner
When I awoke at dawn Gene Clark was driving and humming to himself.
We’re going to take a side trip to see the folks, he said and then we have a show at Wayne State in Detroit.
The car broke down; it would not go ove...
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Story
Tambourine Man: Gene Clark – Part 12
Drew Hubner
photograph by Ted Barron
A true Operatic, Gene Clark could have sung stage, and his natural style was that of the Elizabethan ballad, songs that he had traded verses with his father since a bare lad. He learned to keep ...
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