Two Poems by Haley Hemenway Sledge
Tie This up and take This everywhere. The backs of This’ knees all sicked from This’ scratching. This can bellow a balloon of semen. Ask your mother to dinner and This will only pass time. This is too much for a mediated form. This is too golden for a train car. This is too loud... Read More
Crosstown by Donald Breckenridge
He regarded the image of mother, father and son sitting around an oval table. She stated that the boy’s biological mother lived in southern Ohio. Three unguarded smiles projected the appearance of a happily sunburned family vacationing somewhere near the equator. Mark handed the phone back with a flattering observation about Catherine’s youthful beauty... Read More
Summer Dusk, Winter Moon by Berit Ellingsen
Yet Death yields nothing without resistance. Just as life was beginning to flow, Death caught hold of Summer Dusk with long and hungry fingers. His golden eyes went black with fear, dark brooks blossomed in his narrow face, and his long, lithe body, as much female as male, shriveled and wilted and withered again in... Read More
Valletta Sunset by Derick Dupre
In the Maltese sun shone the catseye cabochon that you donned in moods of absent solace. Beach stones loosened under our shoes, heelground obsidian at the onset of noon. We were enclosed in an ellipse of longing with evershrinking axes... Read More
Southern Atoll: a collage of words from the thoughts of others by Helmut Dosantos
Short is life, and agitated and restless, as the waves now crashing at our feet and whose dying call is our last requiem. These words aren’t mine. I have salvaged all as I recall them. It must be because every life dies and every death lives. Again... Read More
Saying Celan In Silence by Frank Garrett
After the death of Paul Celan, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung commissioned Edmond Jabès to write a memorial work for him. What resulted was a brief essay of sorts entitled, “The Memory of Words: How I Read Paul Celan.” Immediately, within the very first sentence, we confront the conundrum of the written word passing as a... Read More
Editors’ Note: Vestiges_00: Ex-Stasis
Writers are abject beings. Their numbers, like those of cockroaches, are indefinite, and their sight is similarly met with first a grimace of disgust, followed then by scorn. Writing is an art that deals in unwanted gifts, an exercise in the superfluous... Read More
Three Poems by Virginia McLure
On a shelf / on a nail / on top of the door frame / your stares make a triangle / of forward-thrusting gaze. / I dagger down their lines / & slowly, carefully, leg / outside. I check myself: Alive. So it feels right to palm you down / & line your painted faces... Read More
Dark Chamber by Jimmy Chen
An illustration in Albrecht Dürer's The Painter's Manual (1525) shows a man attempting to master perspective using a grid through which a reclining model is seen. In the background, two adjacent windows, one functioning as a landscape and the other as a still life, act as grids themselves. For unclear reasons, the model's hand hovers... Read More
A Thousand Lives by Matthew Jakubowski
I wondered about the world between books and people, remembering an old idea I’d read, that we exist first as thoughts, then as words on a page, and only by some ghost of a chance, when someone gets lucky, are we eventually made flesh... Read More