FOUR WAY REVIEW

An Electronic Literary Journal

Category: Issue 4

  • ISSUE 4

    ISSUE 4

    FALL 2013 Work by Kurt Brown, Laurie Stone, Traci Brimhall, David Haynes and more.

  • TWO POEMS by Megan Peak

                                           —In your bed, I lie open to all the ways you have me: husked, sown, ruined. You hover above, right hand burgeoning like a mushroom, white, trembling. Outside the pine seeds slip from their cones, plummet toward the ground. After you strike, I don’t try

  • THE SHATTER OF BIRDS by Javier Zamora

                                   after Abuelita Javiercito, you’re leaving me tomorrow when our tortilla-and-milk breaths will whisper te amo. When I’ll pray the sun won’t devour your northbound steps. I’m giving you this conch swallowed with this delta’s waves and the sound of sand absorbing.

  • TO MY POLISH AUNTS by Mary Kovaleski Byrnes

                            After Ginsberg Skin pale and pocked with moles, your names pulled from Slavic litanies, were strong enough for farm work, had the taste of whole milk: Bertha, Elsie, Hannah, in your kitchens, I sat on wooden chairs, one eye looking out for the coal-grayed cats

  • WHAT I WISH FOR by Kay Cosgrove

    At the party I would stand as a statue, offering guests talking points about the Roman Ideal and that famous grace. There is more. I’d quell ambitions, have the armies stop fighting, ask for less.

  • THREE POEMS by Purvi Shah

    MIRA LONGS TO BE MORE THAN A BRIDE The sound of your footsteps is waterfall. Why not thrust       off these bangles then?

  • THE END OF LABOR by Al Maginnes

    I stared through noon-shaded glass to see how we are measured against our tasks. My father and other men made sacraments of sweat, days measured in squares of dirt, lengths of wood, packets of seed.

  • THREE POEMS by David Winter

    STORYBOARD We spent her sixteenth, my seventeenth summer perched on a porch, talking out our love for her man. I had little language. She was luculent. We worked back through wrong things, arriving before him. Her mouth opened, black as a movie reel—I do not want to project. She storyboards:

  • SELF PORTRAIT AS TEENAGED BOY BEATING SWAN
     by Colleen Abel

    Sometimes you have enough– the cob, the pen twining their necks to hearts, all that fidelity. The dank pond by the council flats, like it’s bloody Windermere. You only wanted to wreck that love-shape they were making.

  • TWO POEMS by Danez Smith

    SLOW TWERK or how to tame a brushfire or how you get on his last nerve & juke on it or how he breathes while he dreams of a mouth full or how the war was won when you got him limp

  • THE CITY IS A BODY BROKEN by Natalie Scenters-Zapico

    Most days, the light falls so thick I don’t know what it is to be without it. At night we lie in bed away from each other, the moon so bright it is a scrim for the sun. When clouds come, monsoons flood freeways, trap old tires against barbed wire.

  • HARBINGERS by Tory Adkisson

    There are kettles of vultures                           resting on the stove.            Some apple cores                        rotting in the trash. Our home’s a monastery,             kestrels hang                         from the ceiling like tiny                                        bells. You get angry                               whenever I ask too many                         questions, but my gullet              hangs open, thirsty                                    for answers.