Current Issue

Blast

“Gas leak?” he says. “Someone called in a gas leak?” he says in a deep voice. He has super short hair and a tiny silver hoop in each ear. I look him up and down. His gasman uniform fits him loose and sexy, and I like his boots.

Pierce Street

I first see the cat on my way out to the Super Fresh to pick up Portobello mushrooms. He’s lying on the other side of our one-way street, a single lane narrow enough to be an alley really, a place where he never would have lain normally, smart stray that he was. I didn’t look [...]

Richard the Third, the Second

The sofa or the bed? Richard opens the door and finds Vickie on the sofa, watching TV. Disappointing. “I aced the final,” he says. He waits for her to say something. She doesn’t; she keeps both eyes on the TV. It’s a cable movie that she’s watching, one of those ones in which every five [...]

The Piano Chord Most Adjacent to the Inexpressible

The piano chord most adjacent to the inexpressible is theone that dissolves into flocks of flying birds The tree as it moves through the breeze most

Spring

Aunt Ginny is up in her Cessna Navigating circles and dips Swooping in the sun

The Decade I Longed To Be Grown

I wanted to talk jive. I wanted to be funky like the white boy who sang psychedelic slang

Grace

The thought was absurd, I know, misplaced, but it was pure. Like her. Maybe that’s what took hold of me. Her eyes were open, and kind, and seemed to be smiling at me, which was also absurd – why would she be smiling? Yet, that was my first thought when I found her.

Skylight: Novel Excerpt

At three I woke up writhing on the sofa, clutching at the spaghetti straps. The nightmare again: someone sitting on me, hands at my throat, trapped screams. I stumbled into the bathroom, splashed water on my face.

Kevin’s Funerals

I tried to get over Kevin, my ex-boyfriend, by pretending he was dead. Not the kind of dead where you sip an iced frappuccino on a cloud, but the kind where you’re stuffed into a wooden box and buried under dirt during a rainstorm.

Catherine Street

When we get back to Catherine Street, the Vietnamese couple are having sex in the apartment under ours. Their passion increases as the temperature rises, and with the sun blazing hard at 92-degrees, they can’t seem to keep their hands off of each other.

Tourette Poem #14

I’ve burdened my son with this now. He misses strides, kisses the silence, twists himself into a wretched mess.

Waiting

You describe your dream: Recurring images of chemo-stallions racing across your night sky

Among Poets

A sixteen-foot blowfish stuck her spiny yellow claws into my arm Then planted her fuschia balloon lips on my chest The shiny seven-foot dolphin offered a smoke.

Local Author Profile: Lisa Scottoline

All my books are set in Philly. I love Philly for its neighborhoods, dialects and heavy dose of reality, and thought it would be terrific to put it on the literary map. The law was also born in Philly, so what better place to set legal fiction books?