Articles

Interviewed by Carol Guess   Eva Heisler is a Maryland-born poet and art critic who currently lives in Germany. Her poems have been widely published in journals including Crazyhorse, Poetry Northwest, and BOMB. Honors include The Nation’s “Discovery” Award and the Poetry Society of America’s Emily Dickinson Award. A Fulbright grant brought her to Iceland in 1997 where she lived for nine …

Interview by Carol Guess Kristina Marie Darling is the author of twelve books, which include Melancholia (An Essay) (Ravenna Press, 2012), Petrarchan (BlazeVOX Books, 2013), and (with Carol Guess) X Marks the Dress: A Registry (Gold Wake Press, 2013). Her work has been honored with fellowships from Yaddo, the Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers, …

Claudia McQuistion   The first night you found me we drove toward the river. Your hands smelled like cigarettes. You blamed the river. You cradled my fingers like I was your spider. So I built a web. Each strand was a river. Your mouth formed an oval, a rind ripe for peeling. Clementines shrank like …

Alex Fabrizio This was a practice where the mother, often disguised or hiding, often under a spread, held her baby tightly for the photographer to ensure a sharply focused image. I’m awake—not by choice. On television, someone’s skin rises with tiny hairs, shushes against white sheets. Lovely artifice: unwinding of desire. On my side of …

Alex Fabrizio My father always told the stories—to anyone, to people who were there—of how he and Paul had played with Uncle Baby. Them back from college, eleven years older than Baby—a long lacuna of miscarriages and things unnamed. Uncle Baby, writing sentences at the kitchen table. They played with him at night. Put lines …

Paige Riehl   I’m sixteen and new, my young hands like white gloves turning red from the dishwasher’s steam. I spray piles of mush off the dinner trays and down the disposal, flecks of brown (maybe meatloaf?), green (perhaps beans?), and yellow (definitely corn), these drab flecks misting my clothes and glasses. Prop the trays …

after Marc Chagall Lee Peterson   You came to kiss and ask me to make you a world I was already building. Your neck bent around the corner of my face — under my hand—so it quaked. You: green, blue. And my dress moving—grey folds, black and white. These peonies I clasp. Flowers meant for …

John A. Nieves   In the shy few inches that the radiator falls just short of the corner, something like an ancient shred of wallpaper peeked from behind the baseboard. I reached for it because it was summer, because it made no sense against the wall’s matte face. Of course, the unmodest corner of the …

Wendy Mnookin   My stepfather convinced me he’d written messages, as a boy, on birch bark. No matter that he grew up on asphalt streets in Brooklyn. I gave him a childhood in forests. I gave him moccasins and stealth, knowledge of plants and trees. I was sure he could put up a teepee, find …

Wendy Mnookin   His arms are wrapped around me, his knees folded into mine when he says she tried to kiss me but I said no and I’m thinking yeah, yeah in my dream a voice keeps mewing wake up! but I don’t want to, I want to see where this goes who was it …