Category: Print Archives

Two Poems by Kailey Alyssa

palisades i shed light like dampness to bloodmouth or cotton arches— that is to say, i like it when my belly stretches & holds in wind undone for the desert; how fingers hook edges of bra clasp how dicks harden under cotton bolded like a cliff but it’s too late— we roll back to standing…
Short Story Prize 2017: “Monument” by Kristen Gleason

Joanna Ruocco on “Monument,” winner of the 2017 Heavy Feather Story Prize: “A room in my apartment has windows all around (a box of glass), and the weird shining black-green of magnolia leaves presses up to the glass (a box in black-green). I read ‘Monument’ in that room and traveled from my own black-green world…
Three Micro-Poems by David Tomaloff

In Defense of Clouds the absence of caterpillar time— / weighted under a weightless sky, / the ibis eyeing a sore spot / where the rain stops & the crunch leaks in In Synonymous touch an ear to the scarab— / how the sense to wonder is a why // how the sense to count…
“Field Journal,” a poem-hybrid by Phil Spotswood

the last scientist does not know where the others have gone. he searches the corners of the stone hearth for bacteria—to prove that there were breathers, once—that oxygen roiled. he rolls out dough to watch the yeast rise, for movement outside of himself. he breaks bread with his own two hands and says that this…
Fiction by Marcus Pactor: “Cake”

—after Blake Butler The cake reminded me of the twins’ wet sludge food. I could never shovel it well enough for them. My wife often replaced me halfway through their meals, as a mercy. I did not slice, then, so much as scoop dessert into a bowl. It tasted of egg and hair. That last…
Two Surreal Fictions by Michael Trocchia

The Uninvited It was the scene outside that would be of great consequence, yet they crowded around the uninvited guest, who in the larger picture had little to do with much of anything. The larger picture, in fact, was more than a frame of reference, for it was, of course, larger than that, despite the…
Two New Pieces by Vi Khi Nao

MY SKIN Because I dream of you as skin and door …I know you have been sublime beforeAs engorgedAs distorted as my view of the world If I could surrender your nameYour lipsYour invasionTowards more heroic hoursI would be asking you to slingYour kiss forward as if toKill what isn’t saliva, which isn’t the fiberglass…
“Outside the door there is an animal writing my name in the blood of other animals”: William Lessard Interviews Adam Tedesco, Author of Mary Oliver

With the publication of Mary Oliver (Lithic Press, 2019), Adam Tedesco gives us a cycle of poems that places topics like addiction and recovery outside the expected psychological frame. A video artist as well as a poet, Tedesco brings a fluid sense of medium as well as outlook. The result is not Robert Lowell-style confessionalism…
Three Prose Poems by Grant Kittrell

There’s a Man with a Hemingway Inside His chair is shrinking beneath him on the coffee shop patio. I should grow a mustache, a full-blown beard. This brisk November means nothing and everything to his smoky sail of hair. He runs his fingers through it like a god. His wife hasn’t said a word since…