The Sword
Ben Loory
You got something in the mail today, the man’s wife says. It looks like it’s from your uncle.
The man takes the package and holds it in his hands. He opens it.
Inside is a sword.
This sword was used…
Category:Guest Artists
Topography
Douglas W. Milliken
Sometimes—while hiking stretches of the Appalachian Trail, while driving cross-country, while forging new relationships—I imagine myself an explorer discovering inhabited lands. I imagine myself surrounded by plants I have never seen, mountains I have never climbed, rivers I have never…
The Tango Lesson
Tracy Picha
He is so deliciously close to me, I can smell the scent of his shampoo. Dark ends of his hair still clustered and damp. His skin is so invitingly smooth, it looks like he just shaved in a hot shower.…
My Debut
Robert Cataldo
When I was in my sixteenth year, a friend of my father’s, who worked for the state, came by my father’s store and had mentioned that the state psychiatric hospital in Waltham was looking for a piano player, a musician, to entertain their patients, one night a week, midweek. My father, of course, immediately thought of me. ...
Deaf Date
Paul Hostovsky
She was my sign language teacher. It wasn’t until the end of the semester that I’d finally learned enough signs to ask her out. And even then I wasn’t sure if I’d asked her out on a DATE or on…
Cans and Cant’s
Arkadiusz Prysak
The rising sun shines thin and white across a small kitchen in Opole, Poland. Eli Sigmund, a ten-year-old boy sits at the breakfast table, waiting. His mother anxiously paces back and forth, frantically packing suitcases for Eli’s father and his…
Four Poems from The Paul Simon Project
Karen Lillis
The Paul Simon Project (NightBallet Press, 2014) is an "album" of ten poems, one for each song title on the 1975 Paul Simon album, Still Crazy After All These Years. The poems explore subjects from relationships to class contrasts to my own take on escaping a vicious "Little Town" childhood.
The Bridge
Tim Keppel
A sultry midmorning in Cali, the sky a hazy blue. Stoplight venders hustling bubble blowers, pinwheels, lollipops.
Deliver Me
Rachel Yoder
That summer before I left, the cicadas descended on Road’s End. They’d been hibernating in the ground down by the tree roots since the year I was born, still and deadlike for seventeen long years until mysterious waters inside them began to stir again.
Russian Winter
Daphne Kalotay
The winter I was twenty-five I met once a week with a professor of Russian named Lawrence Tillbear. This was in Boston, where I was working toward a Ph.D. in European Literature, studying for a qualifying exam in Russian fiction.…