Tag: Vacancies

Three Poems by Matthew Broaddus

It’s Good to Be Ashurnaspiral II The dunes part. Enter oasis. I emerge from the desert on my immaculate Bactrian, sipping an adult beverage from one of those neon crazy straws and tipping my hat to no one in particular. My pride of lions, cast in copper radiance by the god Ninagal, tails me and…
Two Poems by Vincent Poturica

The Unknowable A small German boy splashes inpuddles of radioactive measuredcalmness. The puddles are not,in fact, radioactive or measured. But these adjectives seem the mostappropriate signifiers in depicting thespecies of calmness the German boyfeels while splashing after waking too early from a troubled dreamstarring clowns without eyes or mouthsbut only brilliant red noses much largerthan…
Five Fictions by Matthew Beach

There She Is A woman in a pantsuit arrives first. She opens the lockbox and takes the key. She steps into the living room. The air washes over her, a wave of vinegar, astringent and thick. She draws back, brings her fingers to her nose, then crunches in heels over tattered carpet, calcified from encrusted…
Two Poems by Kyle Harvey

Glacier—for Danny Rosen and Jack Mueller We are the sea and we rise with the break offslide-in of ice,the direction easy over grease,the way melt path-slick. We have notany or much time. Or, hell,we may have forever. What will we do? Thesefinal and endless days, does it matter? Why do we expectmeaning to be profound?…
Two Poems by Jill Khoury

For Weeks I Have Been Waiting for Something Pleasant to Write About But to no avail, soI clipped some items from the daily paperWhen I come across these items I send them on It’s better than talking about the goddamn weatherI am a clipperI don’t keep at it too long It’s funny that there are…
Four Poems by Tony Mancus

All the Things Your Head Can Be your head is a pew, you drape its curve. your empty palm, pass the plate along with three dollars pulled from your pocket to stifle your candle-lit worry. the trace of a thought in one dream as it’s drawn across thresholds—your tiny form against a massive door, pressing,…
Two Poems by Andrew Cantrell

Heliotrope Where one finds that moody is like a word or like the register in which the sky loosens its grip on the day’s seething or it’s ghostly when you break it down to phrases and lineation sloughed stark and low in the cinema of our accumulating afternoons as they buckle, fold, and wither the…
“Attend the Way,” short fiction by Theodore Wheeler

It’s because he has a train to catch that Rodney leaves his room after suppertime. He puts on dress shoes and his green suit, the one that looks good against his skin. Earlier that afternoon, the big woman next door trimmed his hair. He lives in the Kellogg Rooming House, an old brick building near…
Three Poems by Jeremy Behreandt

A Third Place The bell tower prescribed an auditory space that corresponded to a particular notion of territoriality, one obsessed with mutual acquaintance. The bell reinforced divisions between an inside and an outside, as one might infer from the pejorative use of terms such as l’esprit du clocher. —Alain Corbin, Village Bells as with the…