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Fraternity

April 26, 2017 Essays, Issue 13, Issue 13 Essays

He calls me and says, “I got a good North Country story for ya.” Then after the story he says, “I don’t know, man. I just feel like it would be cool to write something about the people up here. They’re such fuckin’ characters.” Or he’ll say, “If we could just write something about Mom and Dad, you know. I think our upbringing was super unique.” He has also talked about writing rants about people who don’t know the fucking speed limits around here, who hold him up on the two-lane highways that wind through our mountains. Or about making a website that would provide snarky news about the North Country, with headlines like Wilburs Still Fucking Inbred and Way to Fuck It Up, APA. We’ve been having one-way conversations about his writing projects for years. Sometimes he talks about working on them together, and sometimes he talks about doing it himself. I tend not to say much.

The Hotel Belvedere

April 26, 2017 Issue 13, Issue 13 Poetry, Poetry

By MARY JO SALTER

A June day under the Jungfrau.

Near the railway that brought her here,

an old woman sits on a bench.

She isn’t facing the Jungfrau

but the Hotel Belvedere

The Radical Familiar: Matisse’s Early Nice Interiors

April 25, 2017 Essays, Issue 13, Issue 13 Art, Issue 13 Essays

By ARDEN HENDRIE

The paintings may be best known for what they are not. They were made on the heels of work now considered Matisse’s most groundbreaking, the paintings from the period between 1907 and 1917 when he engaged with the early perceptions of modernism. His trajectory through these years widened his ambitions and shows him becoming more cutthroat within them, first leaving behind the saturated exuberance of fauvism, then, by degrees, flattening color and form into strange and austere near-abstractions.

Two Poems in the Courtly Manner

April 25, 2017 Issue 13, Issue 13 Poetry, Poetry

By DAVID LEHMAN

Gather ye rosebuds come what may,

Old time’s a frequent flyer,

And many lovers that link today

May soon be forced to retire.

Let each of us have one, each of us be one

Soul unlinking from its mate in the past

To eat the golden apples of the sun.

Youth fondly supposes it will last.

Meandering Zone

April 25, 2017 Essays, Issue 13, Issue 13 Essays

By RACHEL PASTAN

We are barreling north out of Salt Lake City, and David is talking about the clouds. “They don’t look like the clouds in the East,” he says. “They’re uniform, but fuzzy.” Out the window, the topaz sky shimmers over the mountains. The snowy peaks echo the color of the fuzzy western clouds, which stretch across the air like floating bedsheets.

We’ll Always Have Parents

April 22, 2017 Issue 13, Issue 13 Poetry, Poetry

By MARY JO SALTER

It isn’t what he said in Casablanca

and it isn’t strictly true. Nonetheless

we’ll always have them, much as we have Paris.

Fallow

April 21, 2017 Fiction, Issue 13, Issue 13 Fiction

By LAURA WINTHER GALAVIZ

We were unemployed and without a place to go, but we got up in the morning and pressed things under the iron anyhow. Our parents turned us out of their houses, telling us to Go get some fresh air!, then locked the doors they refused to give us keys to. We piled up in the streets like garbage, a dozen of us on every block, sitting open-legged on the curb in department-store suits. There was me, Mike, Paul, and all the rest of the guys we’d grown up with. We were a decade and a half past high school graduation, loaded down and barely breathing under stubble and spare tires and thick letters from Sallie Mae, but there we all were, out at the bus stop again.

Firsthand Account

April 20, 2017 Fiction, Issue 13, Issue 13 Fiction

By BRUNA DANTAS LOBATO

The plan was to take the bus to my father’s farm, to see him in person for a change. My mother said, Your father is too busy for you, and you don’t know his wife. But I went anyway. I wanted to be able to say that my father was unavailable, firsthand account.

I packed only one large duffel bag, and my mother drove me to the bus station. She told me, Call me if you need anything. I said I’d call her every day.

I didn’t mind the nine-hour ride.

Motel

April 20, 2017 Issue 13, Issue 13 Poetry, Podcasts & Audio, Poetry

By ZACK STRAIT

There is a dark blue bible in the nightstand, a pitcher and torch

stamped on the cover in gold. I rub this symbol

with my thumb and I am comforted, knowing another

man was in this room before me, just to

place his light here.

The Eunuch, The Colombian, & The King

April 20, 2017 Fiction, Issue 13, Issue 13 Fiction, Issues

By MENACHEM KAISER

The Eunuch

In the courtyard were more of these men and women who—how should I describe them?—who still were. They didn’t do anything except exist. They sat, alone or in silent clusters. None would say yes to an interview. I circled the courtyard, asking. Most did not even say no.