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Arnie and I drive to the Italian section for a spaghetti lunch. He says, You ever been down here? I say, No. Arnie says, This place is tops for spaghetti. They cook the sauce all day to bring out the flavors. It’s the real thing, Sultz ... Read More

We are fifteen when we create our first language. It is a cipher, a tongue we make by altering our first language, which we did not create. Old words, new meanings. Things that appeal to adolescent poets, adolescent boys---long-haired flannel kids in corners who take more meaning from things like ... Read More

It is the silken hour of morningtide as a fat, polka-dot spider crawls along the edge of a dust and plaster-encrusted windowsill. Briefly, it pauses to examine a vertical, paint-smeared iron bar: one of three that obstruct an easterly view out of a small, broken glass window, above a narrow, ... Read More

Fireworks, flutes of champagne, fleeting kisses brushing sickly sweet perfume on both sides of my cheeks. Cleavages, pearls, suits by Armani and Dior or some new stylist with a jawbreaking name who was lately the buzz of New York. Everyone was resolutely cool. Slick-haired guys in formal gear talking into ... Read More

Fuegos artificiales, copas de champán, besos al aire que dejaban empalagosas estelas de perfume caro a ambos lados de mis mejillas. Escotes, perlas, trajes de Armani y de Dior, o de algún nuevo modisto de nombre impronunciable que hacía furor en New York últimamente. Todo el mundo empeñado en ser ... Read More

A man comes in. He is tall and fair, his eyes are a dazzling blue. He looks at the woman. She looks at him. He sits down at the table across from her. She goes on turning the pages of the yearbook, smiling to herself now and then as she ... Read More

Inside, he found a body with brown hair in an austere cut, nearly the same as his own. The body wore a simple black running suit, no jewelry, not even a watch. The face looked vaguely like Mart’s, and so he went next door for a second opinion. Curtis VanDonkelaar ... Read More

The guy at the door doesn’t look like Danny, though a case could be made for the nose. A mashed in version, dramatically scabbed and weather beaten, and the hair, filthy but spiked in defiance. A strange, Dan-like head on a body that would make an anorexic flinch. Withered limbs ... Read More

I walked in rectangles, city blocks. Not that you were in reach. I knew not only that I would not find you, but that you did not want to be found. With each lap I extended the size of my rectangle, a block farther in every direction. I would find ... Read More

by Megan Norman I’m well accustomed to picking the eyes of dolls. It seems. The thread is so tempting. Even though it’s often a mess underneath my fingernails, that are so rotten. There are these gold dolls formed from an angelic mold. Sometimes I glue on black black wings. From ... Read More

by Alan Britt The squawk of the trumpet muffled by generations of slavery. Survival rate wasn’t so good ... Read More

Turn by Leon Geist Wake. Rotate hand then arm. Stop. Reach for side table with stretched fingertips, touch the gold metal lamp base and turn on the light bulb that flickers, lights, flickers. Bad bulb, or maybe it’s not bad at all. It only behaves badly. Leon Geist lives in ... Read More

You wake up inside a glass cell again. You don’t know how long you have been here—it has been so long that you remember nothing else. People occasionally peer in at you; sometimes a man, sometimes a woman, sometimes a child, they all look in with the same sort of ... Read More

No one loved time like Milton Chesterfield. He loved dates, regardless of what events they marked. He loved all the times of day: dusk and dawn, noon and midnight. He loved the weeks and the months, especially the leap-year fluctuations of February. He loved minutes and he loved all of the ... Read More

“When I opened the door I found the vine leaves speaking among themselves in abundant whispers.” ... Read More

In a different version it was not a pea but a cocoa bean/you came to us in the night/soaked in cold/trembling with fatigue... Molly Gaudry is the author of the verse novel, We Take Me Apart (Mud Luscious Press, 2009), and the editor of Tell: An Anthology of Expository Narrative (Flatmancrooked, 2010). She curates Walking ... Read More

1, 2, 3… Better not dig under that lemon tree. Back, back to when nest egg rests on pennies, and little piggy banked on peek-a-birthday riches, I can still see those $10 checks from grandmamma. As the years fling another ring around the sun, another $10 would be mailed in ... Read More

Our neighbors sun themselves indiscriminately. See the after affects, the linear contortions as chaise lounges buckle ... Read More