Category: Print Archives

Two Poems by Mark DeCarteret

Deluge After one day of rainwe could feel in our ankleswhere the nails had been sunkand we knew that His bloodwould somehow fail us. After two days of rainthe children sang of the pavementthey’d once chalked their own halos on—when their tongues weren’t swollenwith the names of those who’dthey stuck them out at with blame.…
Fiction: Robert Duncan Gray’s “Helen”

Helen is dead. We used to have sex. We had three types of sex. The type of sex we had most often was mediocre sex. The type of sex we had second most often was bad sex. The type of sex we had very rarely was good sex. When we had good sex, it was…
Fiction: Patrick Kelling’s “78 Facts About a Resident of Wabash Landing”

1. You change the side you’re sleeping on only when you feel the mattress folding around you. 2. In the fall you fish for spiders that may be living in your Sorels. 3. In the summer you bathe in the lake. 4. The first car you owned was a ’sixty-four Beatle that never started twice…
Fiction: Excerpt from Knotty, Knotty, Knotty by Joshua Kornreich

You could hear it buzzing throughout the house. It was a small house, our house. It had an upstairs and a downstairs, but it was a small house, regardless. You could hear any sound from any room inside the house if you listened hard enough. The nanny’s girl couldn’t hear jack no matter hard she…
Six Poems from Leafmold: F. Daniel Rzicznek

The purpose of fishing is to get healthy. Why I dream and dream of oral thrush is beside any point. A gray-templed monk knelt and swept the colored sands away with one stroke. I could see a man dancing, bleeding, chanting beneath dimmed light and I immediately had a seizure and worst of all spilt…
Fiction: Matthew Dexter’s “The Ant Colony”

Charles climbs the hill above fat camp and watches the children running between orange cones on the manicured lawns, tiny as insects, limbs jiggling in slow-motion, coaches and counselors screaming obscenities through their megaphones. Fire ants climb Charles’ socks, sting the blond hairs above his ankles. He brushes them from the elastic, slaps them dead…
Fiction: Jamie Iredell’s “Killing the Sax”

The Fat Kid and the Fat Kid’s daddy and the Fat Kid’s buddies sat at the bar watching the football game when the saxophone came in. Nick said, Aw, fuck. Cooter grunted. They all shifted a barstool toward the Pabst clock, toward the television, hoping the saxophone wouldn’t start blowing. Their hopes dashed, for that’s…
Fiction: Michael Sheehan’s “I Love You Like This Because I Don’t Know Any Other Way to Love”

The TV said the bombing was claimed by the Taliban, who’d convinced the informant—a man, a doctor, a father—to kill himself for the greater good of killing high-ranking U.S. intelligence officials who believed he was on their side, a Taliban supporter turned CIA aide, though in truth he was a triple agent, as the TV…
Fiction: Randolph Pfaff’s “Day Trip with David”

Open with the narrator speaking to a statue, conveying the sadness of New Jersey. Describing the taste of ocean air outside a Walmart, the incongruity of homeless men a block off the boardwalk. It’s the end of an endless car trip in summer, credits already rolling through late afternoon sky. The statue points out the…