At 1am, 2am, the across-the-road-guy decides to start shooting stuff. Cans or nothing maybe. Ten shots each time. After each ten you think he's all out. After the first ten shots I wonder whether …
Two sides of what used to be one wooden box hang on the walls of the Smart Gallery in Chicago. At first glance they are unremarkable: vaguely Italian-looking landscapes populated by two vaguely …
You know where this is going: Danny lives across the street, house number 32-25 to my 32-26, and he is eight years to my seven;
About the Participants Mary Biddinger is the author of six full-length poetry collections, most recently Small Enterprise and The Czar (with Jay Robinson), both from Black Lawrence Press. Her work …
At Night, By Myself —for Xiaobo life plays its bleak tunes tedious, gloomy daylight without light a rice bowl drops on the floor a ripple of sound piercing our …
The old men are unsure. Something is twisting up and up to become a stair. And what is the end for? Who would stop here and dream such accumulations? Once there was a fire. It was sinew and bone. It …
I see the moon—flickering, broken leaning against the sky—and am afraid.
Touch them, the tesserae, the shards of floating glass, which skim the rain-full gutter. Not dead: us/them—mere stutters, gluttons for new skin. Life, peel back your veil. Now, see? See …
Her dough-tipped fingers sparrow another pale moon into fullness as a giant beast clouds the thicket of bamboo upon its back with steam. Enough heat can turn a lake into air, the sea …
Drunk Bitch dreams of a luminous stream / & pisses herself. Drunk Bitch drops her drink in the lap / of a slightly less drunk body & is sure she's found love / in his smiling shrug
& after the first course, your corsage flatlines Beautiful convulsions Then, it sprouts wings, thorns, claws its way up your arm to swallow you goosebump by goosebump
It was six o'clock in the morning when I started collecting clocks, and now it's 9:37. 10:37. I mean it's 10:00cm. These clocks are all wrong. Time is spilling out of them and getting everything. . . …
He had kept the bulk of his music library, which covered every genre from obscure Sub-Saharan drum tracks recorded on cell-phones to honey-tongued R&B to Norwegian black metal, in his parents' …
Once, a long time ago, I knew a guy named Martin who did not like to be called Marty, though I'd heard another man, Charles, who himself allowed people to call him Chuck, call him Marty on several …
He stared down the neck of the guitar like a rifle sight. The shelves in the glass case between us were lined with switchblades, laptops, engagement rings and arrowheads. A small fan on the counter …
The morning of Claire's funeral, I lie naked on the table and wait for her mourners to arrive. Thomas scrapes a knife against whetstone in the kitchen. When he appears above me, the blade glints …
this once-heretical root, domesticated / for latkes. My calendar's terribly reduced.
In her recent article, “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power,” Sandra Lee Bartky argues that for many women, “surveillance, and the self-surveillance prompted by …
Mai Der Vang’s debut collection, Afterland , is an unforgettable and evocative book. The poems are full of smoke and ghosts, the kinds of lingering that make history manifest. The voices of these …
As a student, I was obedient. I rarely questioned anyone who spoke with the least bit of authority. Yet the whole time, I remember an unease blossoming beneath my skin. Its petals unfurling one …