Issue 12

As the rain starts it is as if the first drops are the hardest to produce. Some set up time is required, minute calibrations, calculating a storm’s severity so that the wrath of God will be [...]

This is a land of great riches: even the baseball diamonds for tiny kids with ice cream placards leaned up against the fences down by junkshacks and speedways are kept mowed all summer. And our [...]

You sleep on sheets frosted with our lotion and sand, a yellow carnation tucked behind your ear, arcade screams and swatches of oompah music wafting from the boardwalk, backed by the steel-brush [...]

An eye considers an eye, one divides the other, above & beneath the device. Microscopic, many eyes, a globe staring in ten thousand latitudes, sphere bedizened with sight. The bee does not [...]

Inside the bone are thousands of tiny caverns. Each one winds through the needle of the others; each one draws through its darkness walls curved with chalk and ochre, all the skies we will ever [...]

I was too young in 1965 to appreciate the irony of the episode: Alan Epstein from up the street, whose family moved from Wilkinsburg to get away from the blacks, Alan, who owned and guarded every [...]

Apples blossoms soil the earth so she has to wade into the orchard, the tree groaning when the girl chins herself up, swinging her leg over the limb, nubs scratching her waistband, until she [...]

Death is a sailor. He looks like all the rest. He stands his watch on deck, he sleeps in a hammock, he worries about his gums going bad and the loss of teeth. The officers tell him limes will [...]

All the great mystics reach beyond words to the beauty and terror of blackberries to the shore of the sun, its dazzling sizzle. Or they chant a syllable so senseless it flies untethered as an [...]

August arrived yesterday. Tractors breaking summer from the stems. Now envelopes sail shadows of a woman’s fingers collecting like distance in old metal bins. Behind each stamp: dust, [...]