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The Infidel and the Devil

April 27, 2020 Arabic Fiction, Issue 19, Issue 19 Fiction, Translation

Not many of us knew Sharif. He had been gone from the village for more than thirty years, and the few times his name came up, the person in question would glance around and lower their voice almost to a whisper. Men’s heads would cluster together in brief and hasty conference. And should his father, Sheikh Abdennabi Wadd Saleh, appear at the head of the alley and walk their way, or his mother, Hagga Amina Bint Suleiman, approach the store, they would fall silent or change the conversation.

Epithalamium

April 27, 2020 Issue 19, Issue 19 Poetry, Poetry

By EMILY LEITHAUSER

The morning after we decided not to get engaged

(I’d ridden the streetcar alone;

I felt purposeful and ashamed, my mouth stained with wine)

I sat down in the shower and wept

into the crook of one elbow, my arms folded over,

as the shampoo ran down my breasts

and spine. I was studying the contours of my knees, when it

took me suddenly,

Counsel

April 7, 2020 Fiction, Issue 19, Issue 19 Fiction

By DAVID MOLONEY

Excerpted from BARKER HOUSE, the new book by David Moloney, out now from Bloomsbury.

I work alone on the Restricted Unit in the Barker County Correctional Facility in New Hampshire. It’s a semicircular room, the curved wall lined with nine cells. Most of the day, the inmates press their faces to scuffed windows, silent. There are no bars. The architects went with rosewood steel doors. Rosewood: the color of merlot.

On Tuesday and Saturday mornings I supervise inmates while they shave in their cells. We don’t leave them alone with razors. I try to talk with them, like we’re just in a locker room, hanging out while one of us shaves. Some don’t talk. I imagine that, cutting their whiskers before a scratched plastic mirror, they think of the other mirrors they’ve shaved in front of, the rooms those mirrors were in, and maybe that keeps them silent.

Tuesday. Inmate Bigsby is shaving. He’s talkative. Not crazy crazy, but it’s always tough to tell.

“This scar, right here,” says Bigsby as a stroke down his cheek reveals a cambered wound, “was when I broke from the sheriffs.” The single blade on Bigsby’s flimsy disposable couldn’t shave a teenage girl’s happy trail, but the inmates make do and pull at their skin.

There is a common perception—you see it in movies—that inmates don’t want to talk about their crimes. But they do. They depend on their past, their scars, to prove they were something else. In what standing, that doesn’t matter.

The Idle Talk of Mothers and Daughters

October 29, 2019 Essays, Issue 18, Issue 18 Essays

By DANIELLE BATALION OLA

A statuette of the Virgin Mary stood guard as my mother and I sipped from glasses of wine cooler on our living room floor. We’d propped our front door open to let in the breeze, leaving only a flimsy screen between our shelter and the world outside. Every once in a while, we’d hear our neighbor calling for her wayward son or the laugh track of a sitcom playing too loudly in the next house over. We’d echo it with giggles of our own, seated on faux mink blankets from the Philippines laid over ceramic tile.

Choosing a Transitional Object

October 29, 2019 Issue 18, Issue 18 Poetry, Poetry

By LUIZA FLYNN-GOODLETT

Snip Hansons from Teen Beat while debating
Taylor versus Zac so passionately a curl escapes
its barrette and your best friend tucks it behind

Revenge in the Name of All Owls

October 29, 2019 Fiction, Issue 18, Issue 18 Fiction

By KATHERINE VAZ

The fifth child of Jorge Primavera and Deolinda Oliveira Primavera was born with a hole in his heart. The doctors said: There is nothing we can do.

His father worries about his newborn boy being afraid of darkness.

LDR

October 28, 2019 Issue 18, Issue 18 Poetry, Poetry

By BERNARD FERGUSON

the great ramble of the roads toward the airport, the flight
up & down the flight of stairs inside the house in which
i work now, inside the city & its parks that sprawl long & point
toward the river, which points toward an ocean, the soft hush of the air
conditioning unit above my bed, the drop of rain against my window

Ana Mendieta Haunts The Block

October 28, 2019 Fiction, Issue 18, Issue 18 Fiction

By GABRIELLE LUCILLE FUENTES

Simon Marshall (interning tour guide, Art History, ABD) stands in the empty gravel yard of Donald Judd’s museum in Marfa, Texas. The sun dips below the high walls of the compound, illuminating a perfect half of the courtyard. Behind Simon a wide expanse stretches, interrupted only by Donald’s outdoor dining table, still holding two copper pots, as if the artist has just stepped inside to catch a call and has not been dead for decades. Simon, having shooed away the final tourist of the day, crosses the courtyard to lock the gates. The gate rears far above his head, solid wood aged to black and buttressed by iron. He feels medieval whenever he does this—who else but a feudal lord would need such protection? Tonight, there’s a moment of resistance before the door shuts and a figure, shadowed and slightly blurred around the edges, pushes through him. Literally right through him.

All I Have is What I Have Given Away

October 28, 2019 Essays, Issue 18, Issue 18 Essays

By SUSAN R. TROCCOLO

“No one has mastery before he is at the end of his art and his life.”
—Michelangelo

On that bright morning in November—the first day I saw her—Anna Lea Lelli wore the outfit that distinguished her on the streets of Rome: a long cape and beret. The beret emphasized her craggy jaw and prominent Roman nose. Under her Scottish wool cape, Lea wore a gray suit in gabardine and a cream-colored silk blouse with French cuffs and pearl cufflinks. Just the right amount of cuff showed under the suit, no doubt perfectly tailored to her years ago. At her neck was a silk scarf, on her hand a carnelian ring carved with the face of Mars. She held a cane with the silver head of a horse, the patina worn from the warmth and pressure of her hand.

Pilgrimage to A Killing

October 28, 2019 Issue 18, Issue 18 Poetry, Poetry

By R. ZAMORA LINMARK

Dear friend, take me to where they dragged you.
Show me the plaza flanked by homes made
of hollow blocks, plywood, rusty tin sheets—
anything to keep rain and flies out.
Point to me the CCTV that followed you
across the basketball court with its torn nets
and kids scrambling home to screaming mothers.