Category: Issue 22

  The Bright River We Keep                             Outside Homer, Louisiana (1927)                            For Hattie Mae   The broken rhythm of potholes and worn paint points us south along the long road …

                              25% of people with cerebral palsy who are able to walk as children                       will lose the ability as they get older.   The steakhouse waiter sharpens his knives in light:times…

By the end of the party everyone was drunk and telling toilet stories. A woman in a shawl who looked too young for shawls said: “There was a black widow making a web right inside the toilet bowl. I drowned it in a mason jar filled with water. It was so pretty, floating in there.”…

Even as he heard himself say the words “act of domestic terrorism,” Tom knew he’d made a mistake. They’d never believe anything he said on the subject—or possibly any subject—from then on. The phrase was self-tarnishing, forever marking him an exaggerator, a fabulist unveiling a mountain where once stood a molehill. The expressions on his…

Calvin drives down to Boston to receive an experimental treatment for his bipolar disorder. He brings a weekend bag holding not nearly enough clothes and John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion. This edition is over 700 pages long, not counting endnotes and several linked indices. Calvin (our protagonist, not the theologian) sits by the…

  My mother bought slushies the night after the fire. There were no flames, no burnt tinder or ash. There was no fire, really. Just the glitter of broken mirrors, our faces split into tenths, my mouth smeared with red lipstick and hers stained with wine. My father was dead and the boy I’d been…

He remembers the faded purple shade of a grapethe color of dusk or bruise, the gentle explosion of juiceif eaten correctly, all at once, hunger a chrysalis for lust.He tries to recreate the taste of an orange, the imaginedacid triggers a visceral response, he licks his lips. Easier to recall the fruit than the hand,…

A horse is a muscular hyphen—connecting humans to nighttides of the open                   animal world beyond us. Last night I dreamt                   that you married someone who wasn’t me.  A winged horse is a regatta of stars—human’s first spacecraft, the moon,…

Lethe “Sliding down the banks of the River Lethe as I am presently,”my friend begins his paper letter: senior citizen’s gallows humor. I smile but wonder: is it a steep drop into that mythical water,  past rocks and roots and holes where slick Hades critters dwell,or a gradual slippery slope across flood-combed weeds and clay…

  Chronicle The Asian man on the subway punches back at the assailant, his punches pound in a flurry like wingbeats of saw-wings  or swallows the softness of his swings like clarinet concertos, more mood than thrust, hinting at romance two lovebirds  chattering under the same lavender umbrella on an afternoon of summer rain, the…