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
WINTERHATE by Greg Mulcahy
Ice cutting as an industry was dead. The ancient sledges had vanished decades ago, and if any draft horses survived, no one saw or heard them. There were other activities, but the general view, after years of accelerating decline, was stated in the last clergyman’s suicide note: Nothing works now... Read More
Metro by Tony Duvert, trans. from French by S. C. Delaney and Agnès Potier
You sit down on a bench. It’s not a seat, but rather a sign suggesting a position of rest: half crouched, thigh-bones level, back squared or hunched toward the knees, pelvis crushed between both weights—a scale’s balance beyond all use. Migraine. The head gone, migraine within its space... Read More
Ossuarius by Eva Bujalka
Strange that the air down here should have more the texture of something living it, breathing it. Strange that the air itself should impress upon the living the sensation of breathing in the grave soil, the soil that is so afflicted with several lifetimes’ humors: black bile and phlegm, the cold... Read More
A Senile Lucifer by Forrest Roth
I am spoken by having. I am kept by saying. I am laughing. A thing less by one witness, no longer keeping my company. Who has moved on far from without, without a cause to take with. I keep the thing. I wit the thingness, as in now, should one take offense to my laughing... Read More
Two Texts from Apostasy by Katy Mongeau
I fell asleep with our innards like a long sentimental rope. The white pillar holding all of this up has a halo. You can be ruined but not empty. You can be a temple but not empty. You can be a ruin but not nothing, no... Read More
Paris by Laurie Stone
We did not communicate again. Now he is the age I was when we met, and I am the age Gardner was when he died. Sometimes it comes into my thoughts that I will die this year, too. There is something we feel we are supposed to give back, like feeding a body to the... Read More
A Missing Suspiria de Profundis by Matt Schumacher
DEAR ______________, I hereby bequeath you the most frustrating case of my career, the baffling phantom, absurd goblin, and born wanderer of alleyways known as Thomas De Quincey. This De Quincey, famously laudanum-laced poet, is almost impossible to track, a slithering enigma, whose escape routes multiply everywhere he turns... Read More
The Cliff’s Edge by Evan Lavender-Smith
That she will fall from the cliff’s edge. That her son’s sweaty hand will slip from her grasp and her son will fall from the cliff’s edge. That her outstretched fingers will fail to catch onto her daughter’s onesie as her daughter waddles out past the cliff’s edge. That her flabby biceps won’t support her... Read More
Two Poems by K. Thomas Kahn
would that there were endless ink the skyscraper / flame reflected in the Hudson as the poem appears there / I keep you to one side the river on the other / words just copy to you padding your billfolds so that / on holiday you miss a sunset meet a deadline... Read More