Three Cartoons by Kit Schluter
Walking along the Avenue of the Suicides, the cockroach takes the ant by the arm. “We’ve been spending too much time together,” she says. Leaves fall over them like circus tents. Intimacy, suddenly. “I know we have,” she says. “But it’s my birthday on Sunday, and I wanted to invite you... Read More
The Appetite Enormous by Armando Jaramillo Garcia
I trust in killing / Like one of many minor gods / Or some lesser despot in the drag of his predecessor / It’s the scale that interests me / Plagues wars and their numbers / Are quite boring compared to the care with which / One can practice the precise destruction of a single... Read More
Three Poems by Sharron Hass, trans. from Hebrew by Tsipi Keller
Honestly, the tapping of feet and the clatter of silverware / will hush in me the great loss. When you leave the house / will be filled with the glory of exhaustion to mean: / Did I have the strength to withstand the severity of visions, / or is this fatigue the oblation to the... Read More
Lessons by Sean Kilpatrick
You’re born, someone sticks an unfolded paperclip into the meat of your eye, / you adjust to your condition, your conditions adjust you, you die horribly. / Like stubbing a cigarette out on your cheek when what you need is to be bathed in napalm... Read More
Excerpts from In This Room by Roberta Allen
Lea is his age now, the age he was when he took his own life on this day fifty years ago. As she sits at the white table, drinking coffee, she sees his death in the half-filled cup. His death lives in this room. His death lives in this silence... Read More
Pear of Anguish by Bridget Brewer
Into your body you clambered once more. The old wounds reopened. The old skin stretched tight. You barely fit into this form anymore. You closed your eyes. You held your breath. You counted to ten... Read More
The Teaser of a Full Year of Yesterday’s Life by Douglas Piccinnini
Music. Order. Tenderness. Without brutality yet instructed by an emptying / cause for a word like “love” unrefined / Unrefined, where I too fit approximately so. Who made you simple— / pure as an organ that way / In a crisis, in a vision, in an act of desperation to foment the banal—to say /... Read More
Hi, I’m Carter by Chelsea Hogue
During the day our fathers lived in the woods where there was plenty to eat: grubs, clay-carrying water dripped from oak. Our fathers relaxed in shawls of dead leaves; there was proof in the pine straw, whorled by their bodies. While we slept in our warm beds, they collected leaves from our yards in black... Read More
Brenda by Johannah Rodgers
She stops to consider herself. Nor I. Could she just pretend it wasn’t happening? In Prospect Heights. Troops fighting for their own land. The neighbors. She won’t find the right word. No revelation per se. You can’t eat flowers she’ll say to the troops, when they’re stationed... Read More
Nature vs. Fertility, God vs. Science by Philippe Sollers, trans. from French by Armine Kotin Mortimer
I have no choice but to think that I have been desired by the Dealer in Death, just as the very ugliest of the least of the believers can always tell herself, with satisfaction, that God so wished it. Death, as a result, becomes my natural and social contract, instead of being a tragedy... Read More