Column
Each year, Philadelphia Stories celebrates the memory of poet Sandy Crimmins whose poem “Spring” appeared in our first issue.
Poetry
Milk Sickness: A Mother Worries as Her Children Sleep
sometimes I see snakes in a milk pail noisy tumbles of coils & scales
Poetry
Feeding My Father Pudding While Watching Bonanza
All any relationship boils down to is are you willing to do this for me or aren’t you? Hoss and tapioca
Poetry
Lukens Steel, Coatesville, Pennsylvania
And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. The steel mill that sprawled across the city reached toward the sky with the roofs of each wing.
Poetry
How to Ride a Train in the Andes
In a coastal sweatland shanty town, I vowed to clamber onto the corrugated steel roof of a train car, to throw my life
Poetry
On Wassily Kandinsky’s Painting: “Little Painting in Yellow”
Just before the Great War, Kandinsky took time to paint something yellow, something little, something that looked like nothing anyone had ever seen.
Poetry
We’re twenty, nude, everything firm and responsive to the touch, soft breeze cool on our flanks as the pool
Poetry
Where your brother went, a river met him at the shadow’s edge, a river he walked on
Poetry
The zebrafish’s neon stripes and globe eyes flash in LEDs as our bodies marble in reply with squiggles of phosphorus.
Poetry
On the Solitary Death of Uncle Mike
You better hope that you’re lucky enough to die outside like a tick-ridden raccoon, bloating and frozen in the first week of March,
Fiction
Sam’s final aching breaths, and the silence between, woke Miri, and she rose from the tangled blankets she slept on beside his hospice cot to hold his hand until it went cold in hers.
Fiction
I stare at my therapist’s coffee cup the entire time she talks to me about the importance of communicating.
Non-Fiction
My daughter fell under the spell of fairy tales early on when, as a toddler, she watched Lady and the Tramp for the first time on a VHS tape that I’d rented at a Delaware County Blockbuster while she fought a stomach bug. She’d enjoyed the movie so much that we gifted her with Lady [...]