Tag: Four Way Review
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BLACK BALLAD by Afua Ansong
The night I try to kill myself a boy is shot in the shoulders at the gas station next to my apartment. I don’t flinch. I lie on the rubber of my bed that keeps the bugs away and stare at the black poles holding the bunk bed together. The mice play sought and found…
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TWO POEMS by Rochelle Hurt
I admire its belligerent uncertainty, like: I’ll know if I know when I please. Pointed indecision as auto-prick that sticks my sentence-tip.
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THREE POEMS by Jenny George
DEATH OF A CHILD This is how a child dies: little by little. His breath curdles. His hands soften, apricots heavy on their branches.
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TWO POEMS by C. Dale Young
FOR ITS BLUE FLICKERING If you take cobalt as a simple salt and dissolve it—if you dip a small metal loop in such a solution and place it in a standard flame, it burns a brilliant blue,
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TWO POEMS by Caylin Capra-Thomas
TIME SURE FLIES WHEN YOU’RE NOT LIVING UP TO YOUR POTENTIAL So, everything failed. The jabbed-iron trees flamed out in spectacular failure along the ragged range. Forecast failed…
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EXCAVATING by Tingyu Liu
Not-knowing, the last of the last times slipped past us like small ships—no memory of the last hand within hand, the last curving against curve, the last naming, the last receptor clasping and unclasping—the last trace of us traveling from spine to mind, axons to dendrites—a relay of loss. If we took every fish and…
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SNAKES OF SOUTHEAST ASIA by Michael Lawson
Coach Mac told us as we sweltered on the sideline and the freshmen practiced tackling how the heat drove snakes into the cool steel tubes on his father’s construction sites in Burma, taipans coiled inside the rifled hollows, vipers slunk down the silvery lengths; how when the chatting workers tipped the tubes upright the snake…
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STINGING NETTLE by Hanae Jonas
—Thing to get down to: a rich interior life. I understand this is funny—already I’ve gotten intimate about my wreck. Everyone’s heard something from me about sex, but what about his body, prone, fermenting on the bathroom floor? Wouldn’t sleep in our bed out of guilt—maybe a need to be alone with…
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ISO by Sophie Klahr
wanted: a width, a girth. vessel me, burden me, break me into bearing: take this sluice to be swollen, worn, heavy in gait, o give me a heft to hold…
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FOUR POEMS by Rebecca Hazelton
HOMEWRECKERS Say hi to California for me. Say hi to lovely weather. I hear your movie is a good one. Your movie is a winner. Say good morning to the good girl beside you. Say hello to good decisions. The bread and the toast it becomes. The sweet unction of jam and the dull…