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
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
Variations In Which She Invents Herself by George Szirtes
What she told herself was true, she thought, and wondered what else she could tell herself. / I have invented fictions of myself that seem truer than what I think I know, she thought. / The fiction of self as invention is the only credible fiction... Read More
Fragments from Gnome by Robert Lunday
When you drive, the landscapes slide sharply through the sides of your face. They fill your cheeks, your temples, they build behind the eyes and ears. Soon they’re ripped by the wind or a gawker’s stare from the back of your head, and you’re again in the landscape... Read More
Your Famous Sister Walking Through a Plate-Glass Door at the Gehry Museum If It Existed by Forrest Roth
I distrust people, everyone in this city, those who speak in the anecdotal. Yes I know you did something. We all did. And we all know each other. We know your famous sister, and you and her were, like, aberrant: seeming to cause willful self-injury and thus a seething insult... Read More
Saints by Laura Ellen Joyce
The first time you watch this reel, do it with a blindfold. Slowly lift the silk from your eyes and let the sharpness come into focus. Unless you want an iron shock—in that case pin open your eyes and let it flood you. There are one hundred precious metals in this reel. They have been... Read More
Hellhole by Tristan Foster
On a night when the moon is low and yellow as egg yolk, I watch a plane, silhouetted but for a few blinking lights, flying quiet as a bat over the roof of my home. Inside, upstairs, I use a pencil and an old city map that’s dog-eared at the corners to plot the possible... Read More