Category: Issue 18

A story told this many times becomes the forest.No beginning, no end, no longer a narrative but the airwe breathe. For centuries, a woman with a namerises from her sleep—becomes a tree—rains back down again into her rest. One myth for how poetry began:a man, reaching. Violence. Myth: Apollo finds the tree inside of a…

These sisters, both teenagers, share a bedroom. The bedroom is too small for them to share, a fact that’s become clearer the past year or so, but one that won’t fully be understood until later, when they’ve both moved away from the house and graduated into adulthood, where they can recall the way the bedroom…

When I was still training for marathons, I tried to run a 30 km loop from Groningen to Bedum and back. I got lost and ended up in Beijum, a neighborhood built in the Seventies, with streets folding into each other like lobes of a brain. By then it was getting dark, and the skies…

I am not a well-loved man in Plymouth Colony.  I’m a man-hussy where it’s so buttoned-up folks wear cods to marital bed. For loo-looking and varied lowercase perversions, the bailiff, Mr. Ben, will crack your chestnuts. For just saucy whistles, Mr. Ben strung up John “Horndog” Smith by his ween, to give you an idea.…

In the early morning, before anyone else is awake, the orange-yellow glow of the shaded lamp cuts the gray semi-darkness. Beside the lamp, on the sofa, you half-sit, half-lie among the cushions, reading a book with the help of glasses you have needed only recently; with a small device and earphones you listen to wordless…

Yasmín and Berto became one body while Linda remained a constant voice in their ears, sounding cool and detached as she issued instructions. “Roll up, release the clutch, and rock in place for thirty seconds,” Linda said. A virtual fertility coach, Linda knew and understood the couple’s internal frequencies better than they did. “Dock and…

to grief. I am thinking my letter will need a stamp, the one from when they landed on the moon.The mail carrier will arrive in his royal blue shorts. I will hand him my letter, and he will hand me a small bundleof nothing I want. The envelope will be neither heavy nor light. When…

Every maple leaf stiffens to an open hand of do you have my keys? Against a cloud, the comma of a crow. In a bare tree, the semicolon of two crows. It snowed last night then meltedby sunrise, but notice how the ground is lower, more within itself, flannel-wrapped and quiet. O November. Muss up…

When I had sex with him, I got sick. For the majority of a year I suffered at least one kind of infection. I was instructed to sleep with a tablet of boric acid inside myself. A doctor said, this could kill someone if they swallowed it but I already knew. In Tucson, I had mixed it—a rubbery powder— with sugar and…

Primer (Brass + Lead) The bullet base is made from the kind of brass that otherwise would have been a classroom doorknob or cheap ring at one of those prequarantine gathering places with games of chance & lights that surprise & delight. Or molded into new French horns for the underfunded youth band—no solos for the hornists, but they are…

I barely recognize it. The sharp fence in the waning desert. It’s so compact inside, it’s hard to see behind the window. But in every angle, I can see the city behind it. The night, birdless. Unnegotiable. I liketo think I’m somehow making this land. This endless expanse, blown over. Except, I cannot enter the…