Tag: Four Way Review
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EVEN AS YOU TELL ME OF THE HORSES by Ama Codjoe
The number of nights I’ve spent alone crowd the grass like fallen green apples. They are years spotted, bruised, and wasting. Not a spell or a season, but a lifetime—a good life with a brick house, libraries, a surprise party for my thirty-third birthday, leather boots, Fela Kuti, and mercy dressed in my…
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MRI by Leila Chatti
I wear a gown that ties in the back; this is how I am sure I am sick. The nurse can’t be more than a few years older than I, smiling as if we’re friends while I grip closed the gape of my frock. Laying down on the narrow carriage, I think it’s a bit…
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SUMMER TRIANGLE by M.J. Bender
Deneb in the Swan; Altair in the Eagle; Vega in the Lyre—he brought home a woman at three in the morning and told me to get out of bed and go sit on the front porch. I listened to her having an orgasm— a chord, a jazz chord: three thirds on top of the root.…
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THE NATURE OF LOVE by Aaron Belz
I disagree with you about the nature of love and by extension about art or rather the role of form in art for while abstraction can delight the senses it is not sustainable or repeatable and what humans need is more like a glass of water not only upon waking but one at lunchtime and…
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BROWNING UP NICELY by S.M. Brodie
The 1970’s were full of firsts for many people. Richard Nixon became the first president to resign from office. Raul Castro became the first Latino to hold the office of Governor in the great State of Arizona.
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TWO POEMS by Marlin M. Jenkins
DRINKING GAME When the pastor spits while sputtering any variation of God’s name.
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FIVE STORIES by Karen Brennan
THE CORPSE AND ITS ADMIRERS The coffin is grey with gold curlicues at the corners, at each of the four corners, although we only see two from where we are sitting with our mother.
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TWO POEMS by Tyree Daye
SAME OAKS, SAME YEAR My cousin kept me and his little brother saved me from our uncle’s pit bull, then spent seven years in prison for his set. Every other word he said was blood.
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HURT MUSIC by Melissa Cundieff-Pexa
The bell’s emptied space has no name. I would like to call it my never-born. I’m there and the metal clapper and bowl are asleep. My never-born is awake, very quiet. I don’t want to reach for him. I don’t want to fall from the rope’s fray or draw nothing from the naming. I call,…
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RAINY RIVER by Eric Lloyd Blix
They park fifty feet from shore, Nichols and his daughter, despite her quiet protests. “The river hasn’t changed,” he says, sipping Hamm’s, the last can of four he brought for the road. “It looks the god damn same.”
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TWO POEMS by Hannah Dela Cruz Abrams
LETTER IN EXCHANGE FOR Painting all the spines of the books blue, for example. Tasting me so absolutely as to know the monsoon of my sickness. Licking my lips clean of disturbance while hunting for the trees I want at every window, that wanton green. What if, in reciprocation, you gave me every song you…