Tag: Vacancies

“Marvel,” a lyric essay by Jennifer H. Fortin

Why does it bother me when others marvel at what I don’t find wondrous? It has to do with naiveté, with undue congratulations. I feel bad every second of every day. Or it has to do with false enticement: they are trying, via Marvel, to elicit a dramatic reaction. I can’t believe x! Marvel as…
“An Important Message from a Mysterious Place,” poetry by Meredith Blankinship

If the haunting was a haunting you deservedhow do you expect to live withoutthe quietude of my displeasure? The facesthat show when the film gets developedharnessing all the fun of a lie to provesomething by transparency. When youput a light behind some ice, whenyou flick through with alabaster care.The scrolls are ancient but predictable.Who would…
“Notes from Toledo,” a micro-essay by Megan Martin

We got in a car and drove to Toledo. Toledo felt like bad news. I thought it was just your sister’s neighborhood where there were very few windows you could see through (bars, boards, broken glass, darkness), but those ghostly windows looked out at us everywhere we went. Their pit was raging at the door…
Two Poems by Jim Whiteside

The Waters There is a flood in my mother’s hometownthat will wash away more than gravel roads,leave behind so much more than silt and driftwood.As the waters of the Mississippi crawl upthe floodwalls beyond the marks from years past—The Great Flood of 1913; The Hundred-Year Flood of 1952,the year of her birth—the people of Cairo…
“Foundation,” a fiction story by Christine Hennessey

There was a man living in her walls. Fiona hadn’t seen or spoken to him, though late at night when he emerged from behind the plaster she could hear the sounds he made, the grease sizzling in the frying pan, the methodic thud of knife against cutting board. The scents that slipped under her bedroom…
Fiction: An Excerpt from Visions by Troy James Weaver

That day, the first day, she didn’t believe me, and it would be another ten years before she finally would—and then only after she was dead. I knew she’d be in the kitchen. She was always in the kitchen. She was cooking grits in a small pot, and had the radio turned up, listening to…
“Eviction,” a poem by Brooke Ellsworth

The head of the primal tiger glared out at me in a blowout commercial space. Wine tastings take us into these nasty elevators, spoken for narrowness. The sun is “crazy” & boosted. A build-up of thunderheads here in blue Summer: a panicbombshell of meaningcan be fixedwith pairs ofex-000girlfriendsthere is the show-offMy thing is that I’m…
Poetry: Jared Joseph’s “Yes There’s No Litter, No Homeless”

matte and somehow stupid, the This (this photograph, tireless repetition of contingency arated without destroying them both; the windowpane me, in a severe tone: “Get back to Photography. What (however naive it might be): a desperate resistance to turn of the dead neously make another body for myself, I transform myself task) I have been…
“The Doctor Will See You Now,” a story by Kevin O Cuinn

When he opens his eyes, he’s back in the room, the one without doors, walls or mentionables. And a feeling that this isn’t new. Then a thought that this is old, which a) it is, and b) is worrying for the approximate duration of a sneeze. The path is hair, so much hair, the pretty…