FOUR WAY REVIEW

An Electronic Literary Journal

Category: Issue 12

  • TWO POEMS by Kyle Dargan

    TWO POEMS by Kyle Dargan

    BEAUTY Miss Iraq, the first               crowned                         in forty years of foreign meddling, means it when she wishes for world peace—                                                 her cousins’ deaths both tallied               by sectarian violence in her war-quilted, war-torn nation.                                                 She is aware the pageantry—       pinup smiles and stiff, cupped hands (their rotational gesture) —will not beckon peace.   Salvation             may have…

  • LEFTOVERS by Leslie Pietrzyk

    My English teacher said yesterday there’s no gift that doesn’t come with chains. No one was listening because she’s always spouting stupid crap but she, right at that exact second, started giving me her sharp-eye and I wrote it down and she smiled this tight way that prickled me. I think she knows who my…

  • FRANCIE AND SAMANTHA by Janice Obuchowski

    In her early 20s, she left the Midwest for Los Angeles, thereby startling her parents, who’d assumed that once her schooling was over she’d settle into her adult life as a schoolteacher in Indiana, find a husband, and raise some children. But her time at the University of Michigan had broadened her sense of life’s…

  • JACONITA by Dylan Brie Ducey

    JACONITA by Dylan Brie Ducey

    Posey woke me up that first morning in Jaconita. She stood next to the bed in her underpants, clutching her princess nightgown in one hand and her Mother Goose blanket in the other.

  • Issue 12

    Issue 12

    New work by Kyle Dargan, Leslie Pietrzyk, Rochelle Hurt, and many more

  • JELLYFISH by Shenandoah Sowash

    JELLYFISH by Shenandoah Sowash

    All afternoon we’ve been coring apples with the conviction of inmates. A train sings somewhere close, steps off the tracks & lands in my palm. The apples spill like people out of taxis – red-faced & round. My hand is too small to hold you. Or the train. We’re fragile as jellyfish, as little boys…

  • HERE, THE SPARROWS WERE, ALL ALONG by Chelsea Dingman

    HERE, THE SPARROWS WERE, ALL ALONG by Chelsea Dingman

                                                                                Every minute or so, a hallelujah dies in someone’s mouth. Every minute or so, a gunshot.               A ceasefire. A tire shreds                             on the highway, & pieces flit like sparrows across the sky. Silly me. I thought                                                                             we were here to live.               The garden’s hallelujahs: tulips & rhododendrons, alive in the ground. We expect so much…

  • TWO POEMS by Amorak Huey

    FMK   You can leave me and I will not kill you. That this needs to be said is insane but I am a man, and this is the world. Probably it should have been in our vows: in sickness and so forth, I will wash your coffee cups and do the laundry if you…

  • TWO POEMS by Kara Kai Wang

    HUNDRED FLOWERS CAMPAIGN 百花運動   A hundred flowers I lay here for you. A hundred I have counted. A hundred white rabbits roaming for a hundred years, a hundred years of moss I will grow for you. A hundred acres of grassland, on which a hundred of the wisest willows kneel in your honor. Radishes…

  • CLIMATE-CONTROLLED by Marielle Prince

    They’ve given me a window. Now I don’t need the umbrellas collapsed under the coat rack to tell me about the rain, and the jackets I’ve come to know on hangers leave on shoulders, bunch out on lunch breaks, file home at the end of the day. I stay. The janitor makes his last pass,…

  • SUPERNOVA by Victoria McArtor

    SUPERNOVA by Victoria McArtor

                                A star unhooks because                             when light and lonely                             both want you, one                             might not get his way.                             From the urge to trap                             the body into routine,                             I’ve named each of the                             white birds déjà vu.                             Stop flinching already.

  • ROBIN’S EGG by Keith Leonard

    ROBIN’S EGG by Keith Leonard

    This blue-green robin’s egg cracked, now, and left in the porch nest—impossibly light in my palm. Somehow the chick knew to press its beak against the egg’s surrounding walls. In darkness, it must have followed sound—the thunder clap, its mother’s song, the dog—each driving its first and final fissure of the shell. But how did…