Volume 19, Issue 1

The star was dying

but I bought it anyway, thinking I could bring it back by blowing fire into its points, but not about what might transpire if it flared while I was holding it, shining through my palm. Then I showed it to a blue-haired woman on the bus. Why do I buy things that are dying? At first, I worried she’d be… Read more →

Playing Ping Pong in the Karaoke Bar Next to the Prison Where They Kill People

I lost a game of ping pong once. I was in my fifth semester as an undergrad in Huntsville, Texas, and I didn’t know my opponent well, nor did I generally play ping pong, but the opportunity to engage with someone who only moments before had been sitting in a decommissioned electric chair pushed against the wall of the karaoke… Read more →

Street Names

are all lies. I left my love in the ER and slid into predawn dark, faintly aware that I passed through the afterlife of a Pottawattami village noted on the Treaty of Detroit. Evergreen climbs from the Rouge through the city until it grays in a welter of interstates and stripmalls. But it begins where an old road once stretched… Read more →

A door opens to that day

My father long-gone, I open one of his books, Bonnard or Vuillard—torn paper flutters to the floor. His drawing of two cows, one little & one big, their outlines wobbly as calf legs. A door opens to that day when he told me stories about a year he spent roping cattle, being a cowboy. We rode through the valley. Cigarette… Read more →

Already the Decline

In real life, I put my head in a machine. How is this brain different from all other brains? My transient, shifting butterfly-shape of a landscape in its final stage – possibly shrinking, almost definitely frayed — but already on the downswing. Wired into the surface, the metallic clatter of pulsing attachments, steel stimulation, determines levels of insult. Pay the… Read more →

Nepotism

If only your mother had been a waterfall or a strawberry bush, a flock of albatross with sun woven into their veins. If only your father cried, even once, or saw a mug of coffee perched in moonlight and exclaimed that’s beautiful enough to paint. Haven’t you realized? Everything you did not inherit went to someone else. No matter what… Read more →

E-S-O-T-A

“Whatever happened to telephone poles?” Daniel said, after Allison handed him another poster, which he palmed against a tree. She worried about this—attaching the MISSING posters to trees. She thought people would find it trashy or inconsiderate. Most likely both. She shrugged. “I guess satellites, or whatever, have mostly replaced them.” The day so far, an early morning in August,… Read more →