Three Poems
Amuse-Bouche A dollop of cream from your ownmother’s milk, seasoned with tearsfrom the first girl you kissed,garnished with coarse-cut parsley,served in the shell of a snail. Lint from your best-loved old jumpersprinkled with grains from your childhoodsandbox, placed on your luckiest penny,soaked in rum and a roiling blue flame,crackling with cinnamon gunpowder. Wax shavings from…
Read MoreHandling the Truth—An Excerpt
An excerpt from Handling the Truth by Beth Kephart Prefatory Maybe the audacity of it thrills you. Maybe it’s always been like this: You out on the edge with your verity serums, your odd-sized heart, your wet eyes, urging. Maybe this is what you are good for, after all, or good at, though there, you’ve…
Read MoreThe Stupidest Thing I’ve Ever Done
The moment after I fall, I think I can’t get up. I see the headlights of a car a few feet away. The car is waiting to cross the intersection, but I’m lying in its way. One leg of my jeans is wet from sliding through water. My backpack is still wrapped around my shoulders.…
Read MoreRed on White
Red on White (Father) Never leave a mark, not paint, not blood. Instead, let all remember the white space where you were, the intricate outline of the chair you sat in, your place at the head of a table so glossy and large, as big as a ping-pong table, made by Grandpa, now only an…
Read MoreThey Walk This Way in Paris Too | 5 Photographs
dia de los muertos
“And that’s it, friends. I’ve done it all, I’ve lived it all. If I had the strength, I’d cry.”—Roberto Bolaño, 2666 I. looking back,the heat death of the universecould be felt by 1995when Friends and Jerry Seinfeldput their legs up on our TV traysand fell asleepas one II. I have been witnessto the moon…
Read MoreAppropriation
“I’m going to slash the image.” The artist makes a sweeping movement with her hand across The Bathers. “In red,” she says. “So it looks as though the whole scene’s torn in two by bloody lightning.” A couple of onlookers murmur appreciatively. The artist, whose name is May, is in her fourth week at the…
Read MoreTwo Poems by Paul David Adkins
Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan Dig For Clams While Strandedon Nikumaroro Island What do we knowabout clams? I was raised on Lake Michigan.Amelia was a farm girl. As a boy I spied musselssprouting in the oily shallowsnear Chicago. I reached for one.My mother slapped my hand. I remembered that momentmy entire life. My life which…
Read MoreLa Viuda—The Widow
On the kitchen table of our family home in Nogales, Arizona, was a permanent centerpiece: a bottle of tequila with a picture of a beautiful white-skinned woman wearing a black lace mantilla—La Viuda de Martinez, the name of the tequila. I was in the third or fourth grade when I first started noticing the bottle.…
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