“It’s Always Tea-Time,” digital illustration by Maggie Taylor, 2007 Here, it is always tea-time, and the tea is always fresh. Here, a dormouse dozing on your shoulder goes unnoticed almost, your eyes listless and lifted toward a sky consumed by creeping twilight. You look the middle child in this scene, smaller than the expanse of … Continue reading
Monthly Archives: November 2014
Bureaucratic Copy For Good Temps — Rob Cook
Candidates who can type perfect rain will be hired first. Those we take apart with one question will be hired to put the air back into boxes. Candidates who can prove their mental illness in the spaces of one collapsing resume will be placed at the top of our list. What we value most in … Continue reading
Moonwalkers — Hailey Malone
Years of Greyhound buses on gravel road turned this village into moonscape, churned up the dust, painted everything a thick coat of gray, houses, trees, dogs, people, a grayscale triptych, life-size and monochrome. They shake their second skin off in the doorway or carry it inside, let it form a trail behind them, rinse it … Continue reading
I Die Stage Left — Hailey Malone
I die performing as Juliet in front of a sold-out crowd on opening night. As the blunt dagger touches my chest I suffer an aneurysm. My brain fills with blood, drowning my synapses and washing away my lines in sets of two to my lungs– Let me die! Let me die! I die stage left … Continue reading
Genre, Style, and Novels
To tell the truth, I haven’t read a real novel in awhile. Now, I’m not trying to discriminate by saying there are novels that are “real” or “fake” (terms that automatically carry the denotations of “good” and “bad” with them). Of course, all books have an author who wrote them, a publisher who published them, … Continue reading
The Orange Era — Hailey Malone
Once upon a time there were orange trees in Kansas, fruit sun-colored and juicy and perfectly round, so round that, as the rumor goes, Sandy Koufax once struck out seven in a row with a Kansas orange. Seven up and seven down, sinkers, splitters, the orange was dancing over the plate that day. The Orange … Continue reading
Sweeping — Judy Ireland
I sweep at the front door. I sweep away your ghost and our long-handled fights that sat on the fire for days. I sweep with sweat between my breasts, housecoat tied at my waist. I sweep with amis that wither and fatten at the same time. I shape myself into something new with each swipe … Continue reading
My Sisters in Iowa — Judy Ireland
My sisters smoke cigarettes and laugh deep laughs, part gravel, part alto. The family’s shrunk down to a few of us, stubborn and willful, mostly single, never married or paired off for long, returning always so that state of self that is undaunted, undivided, free of attachment, female bodhisarrvas of the corn. The thought occurs … Continue reading
Turning Early — Jim Daniels
Rain, and a fight with an old friend. Sober, which makes it worse. Nothing taken back. You keep drilling, can’t stop. Into the molten core. Rain sizzling in the hot spittle. Rain on your bald head. You’d look ridiculous duking it out in the street, laughing police grabbing you both by the ears like schoolboys. … Continue reading
Ice (Zlatar, Yugoslavia, 1985) — Jim Daniels
We sit outside at the splintery picnic table where Uncle Stefan gets hammered daily since he lost his teaching job, his students carrying him home drunk one last time. Aunt Nada pours commie coke from a dusty bottle they’ve been saving. I don’t know what nada means in Croatian. Nothing in Spanish. She pockets our … Continue reading
