From behind the taps, Findlay glanced up as the pub door swung open with a bang. Maurice came in looking apologetic. The wind had snatched it out of his hand. Opposite Findlay, on his stool by the bar, Frank listed over with hopeful love. “Hit him with the right,” he said.
“Sure you did,” said Findlay.
Continue reading “The Undefeated by Mithran Somasundrum”
The day after I turned 14, I asked Julie Wong to go to the Pepsi Cola show with me on Saturday. The price of admission was three Pepsi Cola bottle tops. We project kids loved to show up and show off as we watched cartoons, serials, and short movies. This was going to be my first real date.
Continue reading “Eddie Jordan by Frederick K Foote”
…To waste his whole Creation, or possess
All as our own, and drive as we were driven,
The punie habitants, or if not drive,
Seduce them to our Party,…from Paradise Lost by John Milton
Just outside, a late season cricket clicked in the sea grass, its song even more mournful, as it was the only sound that night. Earlier, there had been a rich silvery light cast by a full moon, but that had since been covered over by a blanket of clouds from the bay.
Continue reading “Our Party by John Giarratana”
I awaken to computer or phone screens with emails beckoning. Mostly junk, links to New Yorker articles, reminders of delinquent dues on this card or that. CONTACT US IMMEDIATELY, black words growl on a sterile background.
Continue reading “Screens By Yash Seyedbagheri”
And always it is this Gift-giver, this woman from the other side of midnight, this darkness that is not taken from. And she comes in pieces, trajectories, soft angles and planes, curves from a world galore I look for in this, her classroom of touch, taste, and sleek terrors wherein she says, Hello, Two-Dream Tommy, here are dimensions of a barrier, the two roads you must take one at a time if you’re meeting me and getting crushed that side of midnight. Oh, is she north of me or south, breathing yet or not, an image impossible to see, yet I would bet on her on either road I find. Lo, I speak out to her and dream of her, spraddled, urgent, these two parts of unspeakable darkness. Do they have to mean or what become?
It is more than geography hugging me, but what deliciousness in the wind in January, trees stripped to the rawest dimensions, oh bare bark that’s borne. On edges of this electric road, crows by dozens the only intruders in full dress shadows, a three-day-old snow crusting to gray, three marvelous, mysterious wires hanging as if they knot ships together at low tide, weighted with more than a sense of ice, sing a song through the keen teeth of a day going down to its knees in her own perfection. Absolve me, love.
Age 7
You can’t imagine how much I loved holidays. Especially Christmas. Getting out the Christmas records and playing them over and over on the stereo. There was a Bing Crosby one where he talked in soothing tones about Young Jethro unwrapping presents all done up with paper that looked like stained glass. Decorating the tree. I was a Christmas ornament. Miss Twitchell told us to bring our school photo and we cut it into a triangle and put popsicle sticks around the edge. She came around and put glue on them and we sprinkled dusty sparkles that looked like icicles all along the frame and it made us feel proud. We knew we’d be right there on the tree, front and center, and everyone would say “oooh” as the tinsel reflected off the sparkles that made our faces with smiles shine and our lips look like flower petals that would bloom in different colors in April. I’m still there, somewhere down inside a cardboard box under the stairs wrapped in newspaper that’s got 1950 and some other words on it. Once a year I come out and hang there smiling at everyone with sparkly popsicle frame.
Continue reading “About 465 nm: A Chronology by Martin Agee”
My wife, Mary, and I sit on the front porch of our Florida home. Mary is feeling nostalgic, so she asks me a syrupy question. I never feel very comfortable when Mary asks me such questions. I am not good at providing the sort of answers women like to hear.
Continue reading “The Sowbelly Trio by James Hanna”
The train horn rises through my window. It starts as a hum, but rises to a wail, insistent and bursting, fragments of noise burying themselves in my ears, in my body.
I cover my ears again, sitting on my bed. Mother tells me to think of anything else, moving closer and closer. She plops beside me, a defeated little plop.
“Close your eyes, Nicky,” she says, her lips quivering. “Take your mind elsewhere.”
Continue reading “Crack by Yash Seyedbagheri “
It was late. I was ready to split. He had my keys. I’d given him them at the back door. I’d warned him on the phone. I had work in the morning. “Me, too. Me, too.” I figured we had an understanding. I hesitated to wake him. I’d been having a good time. I had been triumphantly unselfconscious. Now, not so much. I pulled a throw rug around myself. In my excitement over the phone, I had said something about my rule, that I wouldn’t leave until he’d come three times, but he didn’t seem too interested. He just said, “No negotiating, bro. Nah, house rules. You come into my home naked, you mine. That’s it.” I said okay. Now, I was stuck. It was getting to be midnight. Finally, I threw off the cover: fuck it.
Continue reading “Danse Russe by David Lohrey – Adult content.”
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