A lesser person might have felt frightened as the bus pulled away from the quays to begin its journey north, but not my mother.
POEM OF THE WEEK
No Pain So Great as Memory
By Elizabeth T. Chao
I’ll leave a trail of crumbs as I descend into god knows where. I’m not going to count steps, but I’m counting on you, Gluttony.
30 BELOW 30
Muslim Girlhood
by Leila Chatti
I never found myself in any pink aisle. There was no box for me with glossy cellophane like heat and a neat packet of instructions in six languages.
iPOEMS
The Morning
By W. S. Merwin
I woke in surprise to your body for I had been dreaming it as I do all around us white petals had never slept leaves touched the early light
FICTION
FICTION
FICTION
FICTION
Still Here, Still There
By Richard Bausch
The American believed this was his death—this that turned out to be his luckiest chance: a savior from the other side.
FICTION
Possessions
By Gail Godwin
Deep down, below the level where right and wrong stayed separate, I was awed at myself for being able to summon such wrath.
FICTION
The Catch
By Tina Nettesheim
They weren’t a couple and they’d never kissed. They’d grown up swimming together and had known each other since she was taller than him.
FICTION
NONFICTION
NONFICTION
FICTION
Gethsemani
By Austin Smith
In the abbey, no one took him for a lapsed bohemian who played jazz records and danced naked.
NONFICTION
Saving Planet Earth
By Bill Barich
Our subscribers tended to be fervent activists, hardcore eco-warriors in the mode of Edward Abbey’s Monkey Wrench Gang, or delicate souls who ate no meat.
NONFICTION
Christian Soldiers
By Hal Crowther
A tough cookie, this warrior-priest, who talked about his eleven-plus years in prisons the way scholars talk about graduate school.
FEATURES
CLASSICS
CLASSICS
FEATURES
Robert Stone and Kate Chopin
Stone’s Adaptation of The Awakening
We went in search of the missing pages from Children of Light and found them in an archive of Stone’s papers.
CLASSICS
The Jockey
By Carson McCullers
He was wearing a suit of green Chinese silk that evening, tailored precisely and the size of a costume outfit for a child.
CLASSICS
The Girls in Their Summer Dresses
By Irwin Shaw
“I feel rotten inside when we pass a woman and you look at her and I see that look in your eye and that’s the way you looked at me the first time.”
WINTER CONTEST WINNERS
First Place
Second Place
Third Place
WINTER CONTEST WINNERS
First Place
Home Help
By Janet Burroway
This is the way disaster was handled in a British household: Simone made tea and cut the crusts from watercress sandwiches. There was no mention of the afternoon’s events.
Second Place
Plagiarism
By Jon Hauss
I found him hovering in the shadows between his office window and his bookshelves, peering out and down through the trickled pane. Where’d you get it? he asked.
Third Place
A Place Like This
By Erin Rose Belair
I want things from him I don’t even know how to properly want yet, but I feel them turning in me like the waters in this pool, dragging up whatever lies at the bottom.
NARRATIVE OUTLOUD
NARRATIVE OUTLOUD
NARRATIVE OUTLOUD
NARRATIVE OUTLOUD
Honeymoon
By Robert Stone
She turned to tell him, already pulling on her bathing suit, I'm going to the pool. And she was gone, disappeared like a fragrance in motion. He called his ex-wife.
NARRATIVE OUTLOUD
Dear America
By Various Authors
Listen to these young writers talk of their hopes, dreams, and real-world concerns as they tackle what it’s like to grow up in an immigrant family in America today.
NARRATIVE OUTLOUD
Two Poems
By Ocean Vuong
Ocean, don’t be afraid. The end of the road is so far ahead it is already behind us. Don’t worry. Your father is only your father until one of you forgets.
NARRATIVE 10
NARRATIVE 10
AUTHOR PORTRAITS
NARRATIVE 10
Ten Questions
for Lynn Freed
Best part of the day?
The gloaming. Early evening. A glass of wine, watching the sunset.
NARRATIVE 10
An Interview
with Don Lee
Your cure for when the spirit flags?
Friends, exercise, and nature. Even better all together.
AUTHOR PORTRAITS
Exposure
By Curt Richter
Out of the many Southern writers whom Richter photographed across the past two decades, we’ve chosen twenty-five who have awed and inspired us.
POETRY
POETRY
POETRY
POETRY
Listening and Other Poems
By Ellen Bass
I listened with my spine, with the soles of my feet, the whorls of my fingertips. I listened as though I woke on a savannah to a lion’s roar.
POETRY
Requiem
By Michelle Bitting
Isn’t it nice to think tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes yet? The stains on your skin, really wounds rubbed clean, rolled in clover.
POETRY
Conversations with Death
By Danielle Blau
I bit my tongue Don’t forgetYour umbrella. At
The fair.
POETRY
POETRY
POETRY
POETRY
Two Girls Bathing and Other Poems
By Ama Codjoe
Carol points to a spot on my back. I resist the urge to hide my breasts. She wears her nakedness like it has been woven from air.
POETRY
Praying Naked and Other Poems
By Katie Condon
It wasn’t guilt I felt. Maybe it was loneliness. Maybe it was my own desire to be desired, since, if a man wants me, I know I have at least a little worth left.
POETRY
The Orchid Casket and Other Poems
By Norman Dubie
I forgot to detail that the jumper leapt from beside the hanging Monet into a wild hailstorm, tree limbs falling all around them.
POETRY
POETRY
POETRY
POETRY
Emo, 2005
By William Fargason
Here we were, seventeen, more pissed than we knew what to do with, lost in the sweat of the crowd and the noise of the music, thankful for the distortion.
POETRY
The Recording Angel
By Carolyn Forché
The child asks about earth. The earth is a school. It is a waiting room, a foyer giving onto emptiness. It is for desires, small but beautifully done.
POETRY
Anti-confessional
By Erin Hoover
M. called me every day this week. That is this poem’s most important fact. I say it first, before I tell you he is a junkie. We all know not to trust what a junkie says.
POETRY
POETRY
POETRY
POETRY
The Visiting Room
By Caits Meissner
We shuffle through the metal detector as one dumb animal. We spread. Kneel. We’ll come out missing parts.
POETRY
The Land of Five Rivers
By Faisal Mohyuddin
In Urdu, the clock tower is called Ghanta Ghar, meaning Hour House, which sounds just like our house. However, nothing of it is ours.
POETRY
Gaslight
By Meghann Plunkett
We lived above a butcher shop and each morning men with blood on their aprons would unload inventory from a dented truck. They were doing this just for me.
POETRY
POETRY
POETRY
POETRY
At the Sunoco in West Virginia
By Catherine Pond
My father is dreamy, forgetful, aloof. But I’ve never actually been left behind before. I walk behind an aisle of Frito-Lays and burst into tears.
POETRY
Ruth Stone Explains the Book of the Dead to Sylvia Plath
By Christian Teresi
I did what I could to hush the knot and rope, the truth of gravity. There are not enough idiomatic expressions to converse flawlessly with the dead.
POETRY
The New Dark Ages and Other Poems
By Chase Twichell
The day’s adventure was a trip to the Horses’ Graveyard. Only the locals know where it is. You have to walk far from the pink-white tourist beaches.
POETRY
iPOEMS
iPOEMS
POETRY
On Seeing Damien Hirst’s “Kingdom of the Father”
By Laura Wetherington
The butterflies hang grotesque: House paint obscures the edges, black paint licking down their iridescent fur.
iPOEMS
Marriage as Light Socket
By Nicole Cooley
Loss: as if you could lock your teeth against it. Or slam the front door to keep it out.
iPOEMS
Winter 1940
By Sarah Wedderburn
Goldfinches spring in a throng from the thorn. Their fat little squadron, full throttle for freedom, rides airwaves before us.
READERS’ NARRATIVES
In Defense of Ballin’ on a Budget
By Marcus Wicker
Damn, Will—they’ve got you sounding mighty Uncle Phil in these streets. Like the still calling the Ketel One cheap.
Light as Imagined through a Body of Ice
By Keith S. Wilson
An expansion into light, or we could have been, or were for a moment. A painting is one kind of marriage between permanency and sight.
READERS’ NARRATIVES
Pondicherry
By Chandra Ganguly
We embarked on a three-day train ride from Pondicherry in the southern tip of India to Shillong at the northeastern tip of Assam.
CARTOONS
CARTOONS
CARTOONS
CARTOONS
Cartoon Art Volume 2017-07
By Various Artists
Great new toons by Pat Byrnes, Gordon & Miller, Mary Lawton, David Sipress, and P. C. Vey.
CARTOONS
Cartoon Art Volume 2017-06
By Various Artists
New laughs from Pat Byrnes, Charlie Hankin, Farley Katz, Mary Lawton, and Gordon & Miller.
CARTOONS
Cartoon Art Volume 2017-05
By Various Artists
New art and humor from Curtis Edwards, Rina Piccolo, Julia Suits, P. C. Vey, and Kim Warp.
