The men frequently give aliases; as simple as John Smith or as attention-seeking as Carlos Danger. She guesses that they believe her name to be an alias too.
My wife, who is usually in charge of buying groceries, seemed perplexed by some of my purchases for outlasting the apocalypse.
He wore a pair of faded bib overalls over a black NASCAR tee shirt, a red “Make America Great Again” hat, and held in one hand the electrician-taped handle of a bulging duffel bag and in the other, a leash attached to the pale pink, rhinestone studded collar of a doleful looking Harlequin Great Dane.
“Wisel writes about domestic violence, drug abuse, poverty, and the inability to connect to others in ways that maintain healthy boundaries,” writes Sarah Sorensen.
“”History of an Executioner’ brings us to the verge of existentialism, the point where the protagonist must decide for himself at last,” reviewer Andrew Farkas writes.
How does one “shelter in place” when one has limited shelter?
In the city that some used to call the Seattle of Italy, nowadays you can only overdose on poetry.
The coronavirus has made me feel more connected to the world than I have felt in a long time.
“What have they been feeding you in here?” I ask.
“A bunch of bullshit!”
“At a time when the world’s focus is drawn to the humanitarian crisis of children wrenched from their parents at America’s southern border, the damage that is being done to these young psyches is immense and unknowable… Abraham’s gripping tale of innocence lost in contemporary Lagos could just as easily be set in these migrant prisons,” writes Carol Haggas.
What if, having escaped Hitler, Gidon is killed by a microscopic bug?
“If I had been chewing gum, I would’ve swallowed it right there,” Jefferson Navicky writes upon reading Maureen Seaton.
Each panel felt a little like The Decameron, where we listened and told stories while the weight of the plague swung over us like a poorly-anchored chandelier.
“Whether V’s and June’s story is your or my family story,” writes Chelsea Biondodillo, “it is still our story and it should rattle and anger even as it hollows out a soft spot in the heart for these fierce and sorrowful unsung stories.”
“Love As The World Ends”
“If This Next Apocalypse Gets Canceled Or Postponed”
Michael McColly writes: “Farber states what is obvious for anyone who’s spent any time or been affected by America’s massive prison industrial complex: ‘Sometimes, we need to stare at the drear reaches of our national soul to understand who we are and who we wish to be.’”
“Would you like to go for a dinner, let’s say in one or two months, if restaurant will be reopened by that time?” I imagine he would ask.
“With composed brevity and a hip, off-brand optimism, Polek mines a bottomless crevasse of depressive inclinations and self-imposed disembodiment,” writes Loie Rawding.
I turn around and gain elevation so I won’t be tempted. It’s her turn to hunt.
“We let her prove to us that not all things have already been said; at least not in the way we
would like them to,” writes Gregory Papadoyiannis. “And surely they have not been said through
this amalgam of often—but not always—black humor, glittering horror, love of death and love of
life.”
Mary Ann seemed more at ease, and eventually turned to Greta to ask, “Does your son obey you?”
Greta smiled, “No. Does anyone’s?”
ACM is pleased as punch that we get to publish Leanne Grabel’s work every month.
“Diehl and Goodrich bypass the tedium of lesson preparations to make their school settings deliciously weird,” Jason Teal writes.
“The Last Moments of a Brave Mouse” by Ahmed Shaker, translated from the Arabic by Essam M. A-Jassim
The mouse saw the Ghost of Death approach him as the humans struck him with the shoe, stick, broom, and a series of quick kicks.
“The poem lingered in my mind for weeks not because of its timeliness, but because of its unsettling brilliance,” writes Jefferson Navicky.
So here I am writing about it in America.
“The most fantastic element of the book isn’t the religion or the space travel but the way people behave,” Alder Fern writes.
“Exchange of Glances”
“The Creature”
The stories in this collection are varied in narrative voices but uniform in the quality of the telling, review editor Patrick Parks writes.
As children under Nixon and teens under Reagan, first-wave Generation Xers like myself have spent our lives watching the rout of the political left from power. Progressive reforms from the New Deal and Great Society were dismantled piecemeal to enrich a profiteering few.
I want something in return for telling you my story. I want you to remember me. I want you to say that I was a capable man.
Our father was a design engineer whose best invention was figuring out how to disappear.
Actually, don’t bother measuring. The audience won’t know how to taste for the right textures and flavors anyway. It only matters to them that it’s an authentic recipe. The only recipe that your abuela—your last known living relative and the only brown person responsible for teaching you culture—gave you.
“He was the president of Quordoba from the early fifties until 1981, when he was deposed,” said Jean. “Of course, he was just a puppet, Alberto Machano held all of the power.”
Surely, this was a cry for help. Generally, the Governors wanted the staff to stay out of the lives of passengers. There were some things going on that passengers wanted to believe nobody noticed. There were couples swapping partners, both with and without the knowledge and consent of the people they’d arrived with. There were orgies with all kinds of drugs, especially among the senior citizens.
“With therapists like this, who needs parents?” reviewer Natania Rosenfeld asks.
We can’t all be like Lotta Tornberg, environmental crusader. I, for one, never had her strength and confidence, her resilient spirit. She remained optimistic to the end, certain that her peaceful protests, with the speeches and marches and sit-ins, would actually make a difference. Back then, her image was everywhere: a slight twelve year-old girl with braided pigtails and a doughy smile. Politicians, not to mention some of the most egregious corporate polluters, paid her lip service, while working adamantly to undermine her cause and credibility. Lotta simply gritted her teeth and doubled down.
It’s the last corner of paradise, here, evaporating like spit on a hot sidewalk.
Oak Woods Cemetery is located in the predominantly African-American neighborhood of Grand Crossing, and the Confederate Monument towers over the gravesite of the Chicagoan suffragist and anti-lynching activist Ida Bell Wells-Barnett, a former slave.
After a moment of ‘studying,’ Horsecollar said, “That’s a mighty iffy saying of Lincoln’s, but it makes a lot of sense.” He slightly nodded, but I wasn’t at all sure we understood one another.
“I was in the convent at the time. I knew that I was lesbian. I was twenty-six. I was in a new program that allowed us more latitude than your ordinary canonical novice has. I had heard about, probably read an article in the newspaper, about this uprising, and it’s as if it drew me – not the riot, but the act of rebelling,” Ginny Apuzzo tells Tamika Thompson.
I didn’t used to tell the ski jumpers about the time they have to endure at the top, but in the more than thirty years I’ve worked at the Lake Placid Olympic Jumping Complex—meeting the competitors at the base of the K-120 long jump and directing them to the start—I’ve come to realize that it’s better to get this information on the table immediately. Otherwise, they grow restless. We all do. And that’s when the real accidents happen.
“The singer experienced considerable challenges during [the 1980s] : On the positive side, she recaptured the wide public’s attention with her hit 1985 album “Who’s Zoomin’ Who?” But she also lost her father, C.L. Franklin, in 1984 after a 1979 gunshot put him in a five-year coma,” music critic Aaron Cohen writes.
And I was looking for barbarians. I still am. I always am. I’ve seen so many. Haven’t you?
