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Well-Armed

November 13, 2013 Essays, Issue 06, Issue 06 Essays

A few months before I moved in, Serge was sitting in his house cleaning an AK-47 when it went off in his lap. Looking down, he found his hands were still intact, and he decided then and there to stop selling weapons. On the French mainland, he’d gone to school for aitiopathy, a form of physical therapy that seeks to provide treatment without pain. Down the line, he still looked forward to opening a private practice; gun running wasn’t worth the risk of losing any fingers. Eventually, Serge’s friends would tell me about his arsenal, though I never saw it myself. Each of them had seen a weapon at his house, and they realized, comparing notes, that the individual guns they’d seen were all different. In fact, Serge seemed to have a very large collection.

Error Upon Me Proved

November 1, 2013 Issue 06, Issue 06 Poetry, Podcasts & Audio, Poetry

By WILLIAM WENTHE

A sound I hope to hear no more

than once—faint chime, small ring

produced by a wedding ring, rose-gold, flung

five flights to the cobbles of Rue Valadon

from the closet-sized kitchen where, wrung

dry, come to the end of endurance and all sense

of possibility, I had thrown it out the window.

Aphrodite

November 1, 2013 Issue 06, Issue 06 Poetry, Poetry

By DAVID GAVIN

About twelve years ago I went into a museum in southern Turkey:

Antalya, a resort town on the Mediterranean. I’m not really

the type of person who hangs around museums looking

at artifacts behind glass

Arab Springs

November 1, 2013 Issue 06, Issue 06 Poetry, Podcasts & Audio, Poetry

By ANDREA SCOTT

And the clucking tongue of a woman in her black chador . . .

And the feeling that this may be less than what’s real . . .

I cannot translate what the old man has said, grinning toothless from
the computer screen.

He’s cursing the Mullahs and all that’s hypocritically holy in Iran.

How Strange, How Sweet

November 1, 2013 Issue 06, Issue 06 Poetry, Podcasts & Audio, Poetry

By JOSHUA MEHIGAN

This was a butcher. This, a Chinese laundry.

This was a Schrafft’s with 10-cent custard ice creams.

Off toward the park, that was the new St. Saviour.

O

November 1, 2013 Issue 06, Issue 06 Poetry, Podcasts & Audio, Poetry

By PETER FILKINS

As the deaf-mute grocery clerk

puckers curious to a chorus “O”

to ask what kind of mushrooms

he should be ringing up, I think

of Ortiz and last night’s double

Apple

November 1, 2013 Issue 06, Issue 06 Poetry, Poetry

By L. S. KLATT

You don’t fall far from the tree. Is that because you are adamant? In Adam’s fall/ we fell all, bruised? Software? What keeps us processing even if besotted? Knowledge? What’s the big idea? Is it my soul in your interface?

Kraft

November 1, 2013 Issue 06, Issue 06 Poetry, Poetry

By L. S. KLATT

Permit me to apply these squares of American cheese to my spacesuit. Is it that I am a man? Or crazed? How will such a man make it in space, the consuming fire of reentry, & the joy of it? I am a fat man. American.