The rose bushes lining the sidewalk leading to the front steps appeared like sentinels at the Mughal court, waiting for a decry from the Indian parent at the parapet.
(fiction)
“How and where women and minority groups get the shaft is only half of the lesson this book imparts,” writes Bean Gilsdorf.
(review)
I dreamed the sun, very low, / painting me a mustache of sweat and coal. (poetry)
I see that the innocent face / beneath the long-brimmed, straw hat / does not seem to know it is raining.
(poetry)
I wondered aloud / if on those odds days / where I felt like a hunted squid / that what I was actually feeling / was Light Cerulean Blue.
(poetry)
I can ring you up for / what fits in the bag. The rest is your responsibility.
(poetry)
All the other cool calm quite sensible terms had stable gigs in respectable stories.
(poetry)
20th century monk / High Priest of Art / The Legendary Master— / in his bare immaculate altar of a studio / in the heart of New York City.
(poetry)
I know what it’s like to be had, to be misused and unused.
(drama)
Humanizing the effects of Chicago gun violence, editor Chris Green chose a form for his latest anthology that mirrors the way a semi-automatic weapon fires. Interviewed by Donald G. Evans.
I look to the nearby hill, past her and the highway, and watch it blacken. Its lines are clean and honest.
(fiction)
ParaGard: [thank you student health/insurance] a type of long-acting, / reversible, contraceptive, intrauterine / device.
(poetry)
Ghosts stories/told around the campfire/predicted my future.
(poetry)
Perhaps they found another way. Perhaps they could stop. Perhaps they just go to church. What I wouldn’t give to possess their simple freedoms. (nonfiction)
Our government only practices against a sunset bleeding into the cradle of tactile landing.
(Poetry)
Merely archaeological, the images of strewn masks take on a symbolic meaning for America’s ambivalence towards public health.
(The Loop)
the city’s landmarks / are illuminated / by your stopover in my thoughts
(TCTC translations/poetry)
I pledge allegiance to no man, / let alone some fucking flag
(poetry)
We’re whiter and more rural which means we don’t pick the president—we just narrow the view.
(poetry)
There is a small Italian restaurant two blocks from my house in Inner N.E. Portland. It’s been there for decades.
(nonfiction)
content warning: discussion about suicide
Can’t lie to anyone here. Prophets—all of us. Could baptize any guy with your spit.
(Drama)
Eyes reflect the distortions / of a whitewashed mind.
(poetry)
The footbridge is missing a plank. / He has frayed the regard of everybody he knows.
(poetry)
Haranguing shots, agony, careening / blue lights stir fever in a dark bedroom.
(poetry)
Many are drawn to martins covered with feathers that seem to absorb ash, stained with orange glass shards. (poetry)
You spend the winter telling me it’s almost summer.
(nonfiction)
content warning: discussion about suicidal events and ideation.
(fiction)
“If countries were people, we wouldn’t invite them to our parties because they are too monstrous,” Robin Hemley tells Julia Lieblich.
Apparently to be a poet—dogmatic on the outside / and lacking conviction within / is a hell one can leave / but doesn’t.
(poetry)
Donald Ray Pollock’s Hillbilly Gothic peels back the sanitized “heartland” image of the Midwest, revealing the often-overlooked rural people. An interview by Jarrett Kaufman.
Another Chicago Magazine 