Well, the Fall 2014 issue is printed and is set to be published online this afternoon! Looking at this issue as a single collection of work, I feel it absolutely holds a torch to any we’ve produced before–as it should, based on our receiving more submissions than any previous year! This opinion is based nearly entirely … Continue reading
It is a sunny day in New Mexico, she has tucked her orange and pink shirt neatly into her jeans. Checks her white Stetson in the mirror. Last run of the day. Her paint horse leans into the last turn around a pole. It knows the course. It feels victory. Its heart pounds as one … Continue reading
The refrigerator smells like sour milk, but Salvador doesn’t notice, not tonight as he stands squinting from the glare of a white bulb inside. He scans the gap between red and yellow cartons and tubs, the empty space between things. That’s where art is, a teacher told him thirty years ago when he tried to … Continue reading
“At the origin of everything is commerce.”–Donna Stonecipher We were a pair of lonely and crowded sexual markets, each hinging on the social development of our various foreign outputs. Everything for me was a dilemma–imports and exports, the rational anti-rationalization towards the inherency of free will and trade. You had the opposite problem: Incoming and … Continue reading
“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
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
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 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
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
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
Coe Review 