Instead of moving into a freshman dorm, I found an apartment with another seventeen-year-old girl and got a job at a bakery owned by a tyrannical French chef.
POEM OF THE WEEK
New Cold War
By Grace H. Zhou
Every day is a chance to hurtle from the warm burrow of ourselves—ragged breath, body raging—to count our dead, abolish borders, close the prisons, give back the land.
SEEKING YOUR BEST WORK
We’re looking for short stories, essays, memoirs, photo essays, graphic stories, and excerpts from long fiction and nonfiction.
The heart cannot remember what the heart does—the mirror is no longer a mirror, it is a spectacle. No longer reflection: invention, ascension, loss.
FICTION
NARRATIVE OUTLOUD
NARRATIVE OUTLOUD
FICTION
The Saturday Morning Institute of Human Survival
By Carol Dines
The room was full of the kind of people I’d never met in graduate school—mostly guys in motorcycle garb with big guts and well-displayed tattoos.
NARRATIVE OUTLOUD
The Audition
By Sara Houghteling
A piano audition with life-changing implications: Sara Houghteling’s reading from her novel in progress captivated the audience at Narrative Night 2017.
NARRATIVE OUTLOUD
Tom Jenks on Editing The Garden of Eden
By Tom Jenks
Tom Jenks discusses his editing of Hemingway’s work and his thoughts about the book’s legacy. Until now, Jenks has discussed his Hemingway work only sparingly.
POETRY
POETRY
POETRY
POETRY
Musée des Beaux Arts
By W. H. Auden
About suffering they were never wrong, the Old Masters: how well they understood its human position; how it takes place while someone else is walking dully along.
POETRY
Dusklight and Other Poems
By Colin Bailes
Even now the bees are bathing in honeysuckle blossom, transferring pollen from stamen to pistil, changing gum into gold in the process.
POETRY
A Dream and Other Poems
By Daniel Mark Epstein
I should have known this was not Eros but Athena come to earth for a little spell, leaving behind her aegis and golden staff to play at love as gods and goddesses will.
POETRY
POETRY
CLASSICS
POETRY
Biologists Test Promising Treatments for Hibernating Creatures
By Julia McDaniel
To hibernate, then, is only a way of delaying need, the need for need. The body going on with its fits of being.
POETRY
Reading Auden (Christmas Morning, 2021)
By Anne Lovering Rounds
Your image on that volume of light verse: a poet nonchalantly smoking, indifferent to dressing well who had it nonetheless.
CLASSICS
#196, 1923
By Osip Mandelstam
Outside the window a star blazes. Inside, a votive’s quavering flame. It’s inevitable and it’s right that once—God knows—joy vanishes everything turns to ashes.
iPOEMS
IPOEMS
CARTOONS
iPOEMS
Narrative
By Madeleine Cravens
Obstacles must separate characters from their desires: this is called plot. The old woman wanted the fruit and the terrain of the village created a barrier.
IPOEMS
Sundials Are Sad Like That
By David Grubin
Sundials lie in the light. The shadow carves the hours while the Latin, long dead, inscribes.
CARTOONS
Cartoon Art Volume 2023-01
By Various Artists
New laughs with Shakespeare, before a judge, at bedtime, and with a blurry-eyed chef.