Issue 5

The Four Times of Day by William Hogarth
By AMY SANDE-FRIEDMAN William Hogarth (1697–1764), the eighteenth-century English artist known for his satirical views of contemporary life, first published The Four Times of Day engravings in 1738, based on paintings completed two years earlier. Although some of Hogarth’s other series profess a moral, the intent of these works was to portray humorous caricatures of contemporary  figures. The images are rich…
Justice
By LEE JOHNSON The ratchet strap unlocked its front door, and Jack the Uncle and I made our way into the air-conditioned barroom, took our stools. We mopped our faces with napkins from the rail and left them crumpled there in front of us. Skip was in the kitchen taking his time checking keg levels. “I need one now,” Jack the…
Race Fever
By AMY BRILL Joseluís is earlier than he needs to be. The Tur Boliviano office is empty and dark, hot and dry, like the streets outside. The hard plastic chairs smell of sweat, dust, spit, the accumulated filth of thousands of backpacks dragged through hundreds of cities and towns, through airports and rail stations and other places he has never…
Ode to my Father
By DENISE DUHAMEL Man who gave all the benefit of the doubt, man of beer and doughnuts, man of wieners and maple syrup, sweet-toothed man, man of the one-liner, man of drum sets and baseball bats and other boys’ toys he bought his daughters so that he would know how to play with them, man of raked leaves and pipe…
High Heels
By TERESE SVOBODA There’s smoke and there’s children burning their fingers on  the cashews they pluck from the fire. The boatman wants us to hire him, says the Swahili-speaker among us, but first this boatman is searching for wood for a new tiller. The Swahili-speaker also says not to try for the cashews in the fire ourselves. Papayas will fall, we’ll…
Lukas and Elsa
By EARLE MCCARTNEY 1. Søren sat on his stoop rasping his hands together, listening to his sister Elsa shouting inside the house. She had been coming home late, and Søren’s father was finally speaking up. Lukas Clemens’s Mustang—a rebuilt black muscle car whose engine Lukas had somehow replaced with a stock-car Hemi—stood idling in the driveway, its headlights casting long shadows…
Forgetfulness
By NORMAN LOCK for David Moore 1. We worry about the gifts. Unable to sleep, we think to ourselves how best to please her, what gift will be most memorable, anxiously turning over the pages of catalogues or searching the Internet—each of us in our own room, dark except for a ghostly light shed by the computer screen. Next morning  we…
Brushfire
By ANNE SWÄRD One dry, aimless day in an infinitely long summer, a brushfire broke out beside the railway that carved through the landscape. A landscape already scorched by the sun, my landscape, open and gently sloping down toward the lake. It burned in the field of barley and along the railway embankment, smelled of singed weeds and tar, white-hot rails,…
Sensory Maps
By KATE MCLEAN Introduction by AMY SANDE-FRIENDMAN Scents conjure up times, people, and places distant from the here and now. At the heart of Kate McLean’s Sensory Maps is the power of aromas, their ability to trigger and concretize emotion and memory. McLean, born and raised in Britain, was inspired by the idea that we form our experience of place through sensory…
Koala
By CLAIRE MESSUD Almost every child takes an object of particular affection—a stuffed animal or a blanket that they sleep with and drag around behind them in a state of increasing filth and dissolution, the way Christopher Robin drags Pooh. I’ve always wondered about the fates of other people’s beloved creatures: surely nobody is heartless enough to throw them away? When…
The Obstinate Image
By KAREN LATUCHIE Seen on a topographic map, the town of Port Jervis, New York, appears to be guaranteed some drama. It is situated at the point where New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania come together at the banks of the Delaware River, where the riverbed takes a radical turn to the southwest (as if it had suddenly decided to avoid…
Saying Yes to the Mountain
By ANNA FARRO HENDERSON (originally published under E. A. FARRO) 1. The airport lights flicker below, and Sig and I part in silence. I creep towards the women’s cabin. Orange and pink bleed into my view of Juneau; the July sun has been setting since we snuck away from camp two hours ago. Sunset will run into the 3…
Vincent's Final Days
By GREGORY CURTIS This is an excerpt from a narrative about the last seventy-four days in the life of Vincent van Gogh. It begins in Paris on the morning of Saturday, May 17, 1890, when Vincent first met his sister-in-law Jo, the wife  of his younger brother Theo. It ends in Auvers, northwest of Paris, at one-thirty in the morning of…
Monhegan
By PEGGY O'BRIEN 1. goose girl I’m chatting away merrily to his back About how my grandmother worked here As a nursemaid. Little changes On an island. Look, a goose girl In a floppy bonnet, charges honking. I follow him just as I follow In her footsteps, leaving behind A fist raised like a…
Snow as Versions of Different Things (Fargo)
By JON THOMPSON desire In the flat uninhabited spaces, snow falls from an empty sky. Here and there, the bare branches of an oak are black against the steadily-falling flakes. When the air is thick with them, it’s not white, exactly, but a glowing bluish-white, shading to grey as evening comes on, darkness in tow. Snow accumulates like loneliness, one snowfall…
Borderlands, or Where is the Source of Corruption? (Touch of Evil)
By JON THOMPSON “as the camera moves through the streets of the Mexican border town the plan was to feature a succession of different and contrasting Latin American musical numbers— the effect, that is, of our passing one cabaret orchestra after another. In honky-tonk districts on the border, loudspeakers are over the entrance…
If I Should Tell You
By BREYTEN BREYTENBACH If I should tell you they come to this place, those who’d written out their lying lives, that they move languidly yet deft like butterflies, one by one they come, a movement in the penumbra, each with a shimmering shield or carapace on the back stretching from neck to the fold of the knees, and over the shield…
White Mountain
By BREYTEN BREYTENBACH I slept in the shadow of White Mountain but around the high temples of the mountaintop beyond the silvery bonnet of eternal snow I could see wreaths of light shivering this big this untouchable this white this high my knowing will never reach and through my fingers I tried to count the sacred beads of scintillating stars to…
Of Yellow Cellophane and Funerals
By IAN MACLELLAN Memories are an act of creation. We piece them together from disparate fragments and imaginings until it feels like that’s how we always remembered it. I’m a young boy, seven or eight, and I’m holding the red cord attached to the corner of the coffin as the men lower it into the grave. Around me an overbearing huddle…
Original Sin
By LAWRENCE RAAB That was one idea my mother always disliked. She preferred her god to be reasonable, like Emerson or Thoreau without their stranger moments. Even the Old Testament God’s sudden angers and twisted ways of getting what he wanted she’d accept as metaphors. But original sin was different. Plus no one agreed about whether it was personal, meaning all…
The Mortality of Books
By LAWRENCE RAAB Dampness and sunshine are equally fatal. Jackets fade, mildew gathers. Whatever you wipe away will surely return. But now, sliding that last book back in place you see the afternoon you first held it in your hands— light through the lace of the trees, and at home the sheen of the table where it lay, proclaiming…
The Major Subjects
By LAWRENCE RAAB Death is easier than love. And true feeling, as someone said, leaves no memory. Or else memory replaces the past, which we know never promised to be true. Consider the sea cucumber: when attacked it divides, sacrificing half so that half won’t get eaten. Can the part left undevoured figure out what to do? The natural…
They That Died in the Water, The Maidens Washed Their Bodies at the Shore
By JORDANA ROSENBERG from The Pocket Encyclopedia of Revolutionary Violence, for the Years 1066-2092, vol 1, entry 1 The weir-trap is set. Iron stakes pounded into the bed of the saltmarsh arc from the blacksoil into the shallow reeds, straw crosshatching the stakes,  a water-net for the sprats and silver pike, eels, and the marshcray hunched among the reedbone husks in the…
Booming, Spring Shoves Open the Door
By MO FEI Booming, spring shoves open the door, Blocks of ice wash down the river. While some people stay in youth, Some regret and grow old. Every poplar winding Along the road of thirty years, Branchfuls of flowers, overnight, Breathing into the window cold sweetness. You see snow in the shade Folded in, gradually, by distant sunlight. Wood that keeps…
A Couple
By YANG JIAN He was old. She, too, was old. Their years, like lightning, slit the heart of the passerby. They quickly finished eating a chicken: He, the head, she, the legs. From outside the window, a warm spring breeze brushed their faces. Their hearts stirred for once, Like the firs in the park, Towering, nondescript. It would matter precious little…
[What They Were Building...]
By CATE MCLAUGHLIN A fine kettle of fish, an ancient Mesopotamia unearthed anew. Mystic cities, the press of fertile crescents, thighs wide like to lay seed in. Literal rivers. Blood on the tongue, hands rough with hammers, structures without the sense to not stand. A parting of fur, part animal part iron. Whole constellations of mistakes, a population…
The Bronze Décor
By DAVID LEHMAN In the bronze distance the last shepherds wander. The last just man is an angry sinner Who leaves without a word after a deafening dinner. The flag of his desire is waving his banner. The moon waxes and wanes and the banner waves. The sea approaches with waves of reinforcements And the palms spring back after the hurricane…
Remember the Typewriter
By DAVID LEHMAN Remember rotary phones? What did we do back then if we didn’t have a phone and had to walk a mile to get to the bus stop? Remember telephone booths? Remember when the question was how many college kids can fit into one telephone booth? Let’s say I wanted to get a message to you. Do you remember…
Mother Died Today
By DAVID LEHMAN Mother died today. That’s how it began. Or maybe yesterday, I can’t be sure. I gave the book to my mother in the hospital. She read the first sentence. Mother died today. She laughed and said you sure know how to cheer me up. The telegram came. It said, Mother dead Stop Funeral tomorrow Stop. Mother read it…
Piss Pot Comparisons
By CRALAN KELDER choose your own adventure, in Scenario one, you step out of your office, crossing the unremarkable hall into the Men’s Toilet, taking in the little hieroglyph of the stick figure with pants on the door. This is exercise, a break from computering. Once inside there are no windows, two cubicles, a second set of locks and everything…
Untitled
By GIAMPIERO NERI By the end of the summer of 1943, a stretch of time that had seemed to me unbelievably long and even more so in my memory, a good-sized colony of strangers had arrived in town. Then it emerged they were Jewish. They’d found lodgings in several houses and one of these families had come to live near…
Untitled
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. Until the Forties it…
Untitled
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…
Dear Darkness
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 stirring my blood up in my swallow’s nest and on the right was spencer the attorney at law with…
August
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…
Ode to the Coastal Flowers/ Oda a Las Flores de la Costa
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. I’m a pastoral poet. I feed myself like a hunter; near the sea, at night, I build a fire. Only this flower, only this marine solitude; and you, glad, simple, like an…
Meditation on a Ficus Tree
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 *** Fast growing ficus roots can push through…
Maygold
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…
From the 17th Floor: Second Look
By JENNIFER ACKER 1. 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…
The Common Statement
1. 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…