Current Issue

Mothers, Tell Your Daughters by Bonnie Jo Campbell

“I need an interesting character in a difficult situation in order to write.”

In The Box Marked Sunday

Danny wouldn’t drop that fantasy of his.

Towels at Sunset: Winner, Sandy Crimmins Poetry Prize

They must bear no stain, they must come perfect  

The Rules: Runner Up, Sandy Crimmins Poetry Prize

I don’t believe in girlhood. I don’t believe we are ever small, or ever don’t know what it is

Ascension Day Planting, North Philly: Runner Up, Sandy Crimmins Poetry Prize

            “God does what she wants.

Big Mama’s: Runner Up, Sandy Crimmins Poetry Prize

The day is made up of language the way everything is made up of something else.

A Point on a Map: Honorable Mention, Sandy Crimmins Poetry Prize

Pull yourself together, sky.  Listen up! It’s not like you’ve been buried alive.

The Weight and Dimensions of my Prayers: Honorable Mention, Sandy Crimmins Poetry Prize

prayers of lead prayers of limestone and pages for  

The Bad Outside

On the day the others left, we’d all been watching from inside the gates.

It Is Not About the Stuff

“Mommy, wanna play Kings and Queens?” It’s my older son asking in his five-year-old speak if I want to play his version of chess. Which I don’t.

The Black American Gets Her Travel Fellowship and Goes Abroad

I. an exercise:   the positionality of placeholders

Considering Need

Two domesticated parakeets will find each other in the wild forest, the bell becomes unnecessary,

Semantics of The Dead and Living

We drive up to the graveyard on the hill toward the top

The Narrow Door: Remembering Denise Gess

Now, six years after her death, at 57, from cancer, comes Paul Lisicky’s memoir The Narrow Door, which meditates upon their long friendship

Review: The Word of the Day by David Kertis

David Kertis begins his first full-length book of poems, The Word of the Day, by letting us in on his secret, that is, most of life is hidden, secret.

Interview with Author Gary Lee Miller

Museum of the Americas, Gary Lee Miller’s debut story collection, published in 2014 by Fomite Press, ponders love and longing and loss and redemption through the experiences of highly unconventional characters, the kind of people who, says Miller, “nobody pays much attention to.”

As If

Are there any topics we cannot write poems about? Can we write about love or death or the soul or suicide or any other abstraction when Shakespeare and Dickinson and Frost and Plath have covered that territory so well already? Can we write about the funeral of our grandmother with her cold hands folded as [...]