Tag: Last Word

Poetry: “First Act of a Movie Where I Loved You the Entire Time” by Angela Sun

for dad ESTABLISHING SHOT. Flowers purpling in the dying light like fingers. Our house flushed with the smell of something sweet. IN THE HALLWAY. You, walking into the shape of this silence— white as bones in the lightning of cracks on the soles of your shoes Where are you? This place smuggles echoes into the…
Fiction: “My Dinner with a Thief” by David Luntz

I was looking for something for my wife I couldn’t afford. That’s when I first saw her. A younger-looking version of my wife. A customer had left a diamond brooch on the glass top and she pocketed it like a Three-card Monte pro. Her gray eyes clocked mine and said: No one likes a snitch.…
Poetry: “Sky Burial” by Summer J. Hart

In my dream about water, I hover over a starless nothing, refusing to go in. Refusing to let tomorrow turn out like today. Sky broke. White plate. Picking porcelain out of the carpet. The phone rings. Rain churns the southwest corner of the basement into mud. In my dream about water, the waves swallow the…
“[UNTITLED LOVE SONG],” an acrostic poem by Jess Yuan

Favorite observer, how youUndulate between a blue loud emptiness and thisCeiling which shelters andKeeps the perimeter defined Throughout and beneathHeaping insight upon insight until it compactsEnriches, densifies, coagulates into Prediction for the built worldArtifact of its struggle, puddled.That’s my anxiety about establishingRelationships. I worry the Investment is seen byAll. I worry theRecording sounds like I know…
Short Fiction: “Adrift” by Max Wheeler

Like so much in Hassan’s long life, this transition was something done to him, not by him. My mom sounded resigned when she called me the night before my monthly visit. Her husband had been changing in small ways for a while already. “Look, honey. I have to tell you something.” I could tell she’d…
Three Poems by Paul Chuks

Self-Portrait with Less Anxieties Lord, I want to be Hollywood-cool.That young boy whose father ownsA company—and wills it over toHim at twenty-one.Once—I needed bread—I went to theBlock industry to mold some.Two coins they paid me—finishedafter the economy swallowed itduring my lunch time. Thenext day—I took a knife to mythroat in mistaking myself amartyr for capitalism.…
Two Poems by Anthony Robinson

Failures of the Poets Wyatt couldn’t keep count of his “numbrous vers”And when I mentioned this, a user said, “pronounced properly,They scan perfectly.” They do not, but as a rule,I’ve stopped arguing with old men. The shaggy poems,Derived from an old Italian, have their mincing charms,And for this he did not deserve hanging, nor beheading.It’s unfortunate…
Two Poems by Laura Minor

Big Dick, Small Town I Love You, Now Show Me Your Tits And just like that, the house of whores— If Sunday was a man, he’d be good, becomes the scourge of wooden hours— some digital acquaintance, a high, friend, superior, colleague, or mentor ruefully horny, delusional on their own back roads…
Essay: “The Box” by Diana Whitney

The box was waiting on my porch when I came home from acupuncture. Cardboard, square, criss-crossed with blue tape, big enough to fit a toaster or a cat. A stranger had sent me a package in the mail. I do not know this man, although he’d written my name and address in sharpie and his…