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Boys with a Synth

October 1, 2013 Essays, Issue 06, Issue 06 Essays

I went to buy the Roland Juno-6 with my best friend Michael the summer I was sixteen, before either one of us had a driver’s license. Other boys saved their house-painting money and bought an electric guitar with a starter amp. Or a five-piece drum kit, if they had the kind of parents who tolerated an unholy racket in the basement. Michael and I had earned eight dollars an hour for two weeks to stain a cottage on the Cape, a mythic payday that had sent us whooping and hollering into the waves, and I wanted to buy a synthesizer with my share of the windfall.

The Common Statement

May 27, 2013 Issue 05

I’ve been watching the Qasr al Hosn. Watching it since I arrived in August. The boarded-up block below my office window withholds this oldest structure in Abu Dhabi—the whitewashed fort—and the arch-studded building of the Cultural Foundation. The block has so much potential, but for months, nothing’s happened. Or, I’ll see a kick up of dust and realize it was the wind.

From the 17th Floor: Second Look

May 10, 2013 Essays, Issue 05 Essays

By JENNIFER ACKER

Maygold

May 1, 2013 Fiction, Issue 05, Issue 05 Fiction

By VIRGINIA REEVES

The first pest to make itself known in the orchard was the stinkbug, malevolent and focused. It worked at the sap in the fruit, sucking the water from the flesh, leaving behind gnarls and distortions—catfacing, Mona heard it called, though the injured peaches she plucked from her  trees’ branches looked nothing like a cat’s face, but more a woman’s, withered by sun.

Meditation on a Ficus Tree

May 1, 2013 Issue 05, Issue 05 Poetry, Poetry

By DENISE DUHAMEL

mermaid legs/ whiskers/ open mouth/ callipygian bark/
semen sap/ elbow fold/ knees/ arms stretched above a head/
torso swung upside down/ hair sweeping the ground/
breasts/ cave turned inside out/ toes holding on/
eye socket/ palm/ thumb/ twisting veins/ freckle/ bellybutton/
vulva/ ghost fetus/ nose/ nipple/ thigh/ petrified cloud

Ode to the Coastal Flowers/ Oda a Las Flores de la Costa

May 1, 2013 Issue 05, Issue 05 Poetry, Poetry, Translation

By PABLO NERUDA

The Isla Negra wildflowers
are blooming,
they have no names, some
seem like sand crocuses,
others
illuminate
the ground with yellow lighting.

August

May 1, 2013 Issue 05, Issue 05 Poetry, Poetry

By ALEXEI TSVETKOV

apples went brown and sizzled on the ground
the instant they touched it and the vain promise
of autumn stayed just that the august was
interminable and the vet was blunt
a month at best he said and that was not
a promise so we farmed the ailing dog
out to the in-laws and just left him there

Dear Darkness

May 1, 2013 Issue 05, Issue 05 Poetry, Poetry

By ALEXEI TSVETKOV

myrtle our neighbor on the left side had
a headache with her ron the vietnam vet
fading from parkinson’s connie whose house
bulged into our backyard was a nurse who spent
her summer days sun-bathing in the nude

Untitled

May 1, 2013 Issue 05, Issue 05 Poetry, Poetry

By GIAMPIERO NERI

My father’s bookcase was divided by nationalities of the authors. “The French ones,” my mother would say with some solemnity, indicating the most considerable sector, and perhaps the one most congenial to her. Then came the Russians, preferred by my father.

The bookcase, pride of the family, occupied a room in our apartment, on the second floor of the building on via Volta in Erba.

Untitled

May 1, 2013 Issue 05, Issue 05 Poetry, Poetry

By GIAMPIERO NERI

Of the few walks we took together, my father and I, I recall well the one to the Torretta. Having loaded our backpacks with food, which consisted of bread and bresaola, we took off at a good clip.

The Torretta, a medieval tower probably for observation, was tumbledown then, and has now vanished.