Selections
About the Cover, Issue 31
Teeth People
My dentist fired me and now I go to the one in the strip mall next to the Li’l Cricket where Shawn got arrested that time for eating a Slim Jim before he paid for it. He did pay for it. He was going to pay for it. The cashier didn’t care. She’d already called …
Story Problems
Circus
Circus The mouth tracedthe skyline in a wait laced with mother tongue trainedto fire. The ghoststhe gods left usgood. In my father’s closeta can of bullets.I put one in my mouthto chew. In my father’s closeta gifted gun. Still wrappedin saran wrap. Ribboned. Flowered. A good old fashionedclown. My father’s handslike my own hands big …
Gestalts
Brian’s new client lived in a mobile home at the edge of the Texas suburbs, where fields of bluebonnets and hayrolls were slowly giving way to walled-in subdivisions. Brian drove a lot for his work, and he saw them everywhere now: flattened, watered tracts that turned overnight into matchstick cities, and then, the next time …
“Untitled [Maybe you know]” and “Untitled [I wave at you–]” by Lyudmyla Diadchenko, trans. from the Ukrainian by Padma Thornlyre
[untitled]Maybe you know I know you know you are me.Maybe I know you know I am lost.Snow rhymes with sky and hunches its shoulders.The cold builds walls like Qin Shi Huang. Our evenings reenact Matisse’s dances,A mediocre melody that should break an octave higher.Maybe you know I know with whom you are cheating.And after Matisse’s …
In Search of Holy Things
In the blank forepages of her hardbound family bible, Margaret Laubscher kept a record of catastrophe. There are none of the usual genealogical notations in that space—lists of births and christenings, of marriages and anniversaries—only a meticulous account of deaths, natural disasters, and unusual weather to visit the Sandhills of North Carolina. If a joyous …
The Queen of Queens
The Lemon Ice King of Corona was a converted garage storefront with a royal blue awning, built in Queens during the World’s Fair of 1964. Whenever I went there with my mom as a child, it was an unexpected delight—never planned, always at a moment’s notice, a “how about we stop here” that thrilled me. …
The Green Dish
Claire has pictured her lover’s death exactly thirty-two times when she almost crashes into his widow. She’s at the local grocery, pushing her cart while reading her shopping list, when she glances up and has to stop short. The dark-haired woman is standing just a few inches from the lip of her cart, so caught …
Partial Autobiography in Three Parts
Partial Autobiography in Three Parts I.Once a daisy was a microphone, and I sang into its petaled star. I had a knack for hiding in the pantry with my books. An orchid for a barrette and an erratic longing. A lollipop stickied my knuckles, purpled my lips. Once I fished an apple from a barrel …
The Rain Touches Everything
This morning we walk to school hand in hand sheltered by umbrellas. Do you smell the rain? she asks. I do, I say. I have always loved the smell of rain. I look back at her as if she’s read my mind or if she’s playing a trick on me because I have always wanted …
“Sea and Stone” by Elske Kampen, trans. from the West Frisian by David McKay
Sea and Stone Come into my room and see, I am not there.My cardigan, still body-warm, is draped over the chair.I have lent myself to someone in a T-shirt, someone witha boy’s sharp teeth. How he pulls off his shirt, withhis eyes closed or open, I want to know. How sweet his tonguetastes, how hard …