Tag: Four Way Review
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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…
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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…
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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.
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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…
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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…
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The Landlord by Peace Adzo Medie
“Asanka,” sneered Emma’s landlord, his bony frame planted in front of the staircase that led to her apartment. It was dawn and she had just returned from walking with her friend, Martin, to the bus stop. He had tutored her throughout the night, in preparation for the entrance exam that she would take in a…
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PIVOT by Wendy J Fox
In the office, coworkers Sabine and Michael sat quietly at their cubicles. In the office, there was flux. For example, sometimes the temperature waffled between tropical and arctic…
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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…
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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,…
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HARPER STEWART by Clemonce Heard
Whoever said black eyes don’t show up on black guys, need a knuckle mountain to the mouth. Everything with the exception of a beatdown stays in Vegas. Who in our crew of bachelors & back stabbers should’ve been held over the banister of our Bellagio suite? A groomsman doesn’t have to sleep with the bride…
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THEY THINK THEY KNOW AMELIA EARHART, by Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach
where she died—days after a photo suggested she lived, proved it as much as paper can prove anything, as much as a figure with her hair and approximate body, sitting on the dock, facing away from the camera, can look exactly like a lost dead girl. And far off right, a barge, floating almost out of frame, with…
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TWO POEMS by Ellen C. Bush
ASTIGMATISM It is my birthday ritual but every year I am surprised to see my optometrist still alive, seeing me. He must be past eighty, mustache and skin of a former smoker, stale breath. I must have so much time left. I’ve been returning to this chair since I was seven, but have yet…