Works

Ernest Hilbert Swimming South Off Key West I wade into the warmth along the jetty.Sharp copper tracings of a sunset waveRide in, carrying light on its liquid peak. The wind is up. I dive. I rise to findA broad-winged pelican, a terrifyingSight at first, so close I could touch it. The bird holds still above […]

Piotr Florczyk People’s Overture                 Arise, children—get dressedand eat your toast with gooseberry jam—                before it’s too late. To arms, parents—let’s march                the kids back to school.Our cities may be asleep, the worms   […]

Carol Moldaw Keisaku Palm for Miriam Sagan Gravity brought down the palm frond’s wideand weighted sheath-end first: the bark,still loosely attached like coarse black fringe,lashed my ear when the stalk fell straightfrom on high and thwacked the top of my crown. On my way to the internet-connected garage,taking the river-rock steps two at a timeto […]

Nicholas Friedman Ampersand We squeeze between erratics fuzzedwith moss to a stand of Krummholz firs,deranged, wind-sculpted, then step from the trailwhile he bends for breath. After a silence,he turns to face me. Finally, I think,he’ll use the word that we all fear,the one that names his mutinous blood.Instead, he explains how “ampersand”was once the 27th […]

Jehanne Dubrow Dear Geryon— At twelve I lashed my own magenta wingsbeneath my shirt, afraid of how they stirred,moved independently, soft whisperingsof feathers at my back. Ungainly bird,I sat alone, the schooldays like a cage.I hunched over a book, my scarlet handa tanager that pecked across the page,red fingers hopping through a meadowland.The only place […]

Erin O’Luanaigh Black-Eyed Suzie’s My first regular gig. Of late an aging child prodigy,now I sounded like a woman and was one.“I don’t know whether to take you over my kneeor take you over my knee,” some barfly Cicero said.(“Why don’t you think about it and get back to me?”)The microphone was somehow always wet,the […]

Erin O’Luanaigh Salomé Running Wilde’s imagination was a wishto see behind the curtain of Mark’s prose,in which he only noted that she “dancedto please King Herod’s guests,” then fixed a dishserved cold. Her charms (and how many she disclosed),her need at last to catch the Baptist’s glanceadded flesh to Wilde’s fabricated romance— added scandal when, […]

Mary O’Donoghue Late Style The last time I went overseas the passenger next to me asked if I knew about the plight of the Icelandic pony. It was as if we’d been talking for years.When they go abroad for competition, she said, they’re not allowed to come back. The purity of the bloodline. They might […]

Sylvie Baumgartel The Hamburg Sisters in Nebraska We don’t talk about that.We make fruitcakes.We love our husbands like cardboard.We keep our nails trimmed close.The skin under our eyes is likeDrowned moons.The skin between our eyes isGathered like skirt pleats.We hide our purple nipples.We forget our language.You can’t speak it anymore anyway.We crochet dresses from bakery […]

Sylvie Baumgartel Rebel Savonarola was hanged & burnedWith two others in the sameSquare where he had called for theMass burning of paintings, Mirrors, books & makeup.A giant bonfire of all thatTakes us away fromPure joy, he said.Savonarola condemnedCorrupt papal power. The Florentine childrenDanced & laughed& threw stones at theDangling, burning men.

Lawrence O’Dwyer Piedra de Sol The workshop is a cluttered, busy space. There are clamps and drills, chisels and burins; the tools might be those of a cobbler or a stonemason. Drawers are stuffed with wires and molds. A cast-iron disc is lost in a blur of speed. There is a microscope on a bench […]

Natanya Biskar I’m Hungry if You Are   The call comes from a number in Todos Santos, Mexico, and at first I do not register what that means. One student has just left and I have ten minutes to clean, breathe, return emails, collect myself, finish paperwork, use the bathroom, drink three glasses of water, […]

Jennifer Moxley 1900 An old cuss in a MAGA masklimps past me, going againstthe taped arrows on the aislefloor. I get a close-up viewof his milky eyes trying tofocus under the fluorescents,one arthritic hand cuppinga gallon of boxed ice cream.Before his about-face, I had feltthe need to avert my eyesfrom the pink chapped skinand butt […]

Elisa Guidotti The Drama Club If you’re looking for the kids, and it’s a Friday afternoon during the school term, look no further than the theater down Risorgimento Martyrs Street, close to the on-ramp to the highway leading to Rome. Rain or shine, ninety-four pages left to study for a biology test on Monday or […]

Daisy Fried Chorus Line After she handwashed in a mint green pail eleven pairs of black tights then hung them on the PVC clothesline out back, she found the early evening air grew too chilly so went in to read more Middlemarch on her Kindle though her currently difficult husband was also within, “divided between […]

Daisy Fried A Monkey Thing Inside the plate glass window, I’m putting my whites in, and bleach, and my denims, and lights, darks, and hots and handwashes, when the tourbus grinds to the curb outside to drop the teenage Southwest Drum and Bugle Corps at Clean Laundry, South Philly. There it idles, its slab sides […]

Kevin Wilson’s “Kennedy,” first published in Subtropics Issue 27: Spring/Summer 2019, was included in Best American Short Stories 2020.

Cameron Thomas Snyder Houses of the Holy One century ended while another century began and my older brother and I found ourselves getting dragged like luggage, yet again, from one place we didn’t want to be in Kansas to some other place we didn’t want to be in Kansas. All around me things were beginning […]

Jana Prikryl Anonymous Her hair is parted in the center and this side wall of the house ends just above her part. The seam between the house and not-house seems to rise out of the part in her hair. Dandelions on the lawn are playing sundials, their globes give out the time of year. She’s […]

Robert Walser (translated by Tom Whalen) Rain There’s gentle but also unruly rain. We prefer the former but take it as it comes. To accept what comes and yet never lose one’s cheerfulness isn’t easy, but beautiful because of that. What tastes the sweetest? Natural honey? No, something else: peaceful, everyday work without calamity. Speaking […]

Sarah Edwards Dead Dog A Louisiana Thanksgiving, and the seatbelts burn hot ribbons across their shoulders. In the car, seventy miles down the road—bags thrown together, a cellophane-wrapped pumpkin pie sliding around on the floorboards—and they have not yet discussed what will happen to the dog. The wife can’t imagine that they’ll keep it, though […]

Yousef el Qedra (translated by Yasmin Snounu, Edward Morin, and George Khoury) Embroidered with Hail In the beginning, he exalted himself above the sinful act of eating the fruit. Then he was burned by trees and frolicking girls, causing his name and the blueness of his soul to bleed.  He searched for prophecy carved into […]

Richard O’Brien Closed Doors Every Place that you left is Eden in some way. —JOHN DARNIELLE Rooms where for good or for ill—things died. —CHARLOTTE MEW Frewin II.10 In this room, at that desk, I must have written my masterpieces of misogyny (through this knowledge would only come to me far on the other side […]

Wayne Miller On History 1 In December 1961, George Trabing shot Winifred Jean Whittaker and left her body beside the Trinity River in one of the long twin shadows of the I-10 overpass. In August 1988, George Trabing took me out on Trinity Bay in his twenty-five-foot sloop and taught me how to sail. Past […]

Deborah Levy The Milky Way I talk to my mother for the first time since her death. She is listening. I am listening. That makes a change. I tell her I am writing a novel about a mother and daughter. There is a long silence. How are you, mother of mine, wherever you are? I […]

Colby Cotton Canisteo Invocation From hydro-fracked waters and sold-off land. From fist print in plaster walls, skinned hand and scraped knee. From flame-lit palms on burning barrels and blown-out tires, copper wire and strung-up doe. From spark plugs and driveshafts and wooden dollies. From trash fires blown to life: came my sun-driven body from the […]

Colby Cotton Neighbor, I have seen you bend the pear branch for clipping, your wife press eggshell into the rose bed, and have been envious of the white grid of lattice that stands against your porch steps, how the golden arch of pollen falls through the cedars and clings to your windows. For you have […]

Bill Gaythwaite A Place in the World I was getting some sun during my lunch hour the day I met Fisher. We were in the middle of Central Park, on that big, green lawn called the Sheep Meadow. It was a warm afternoon in late April, and the sky had the pale blue look of […]

Christian Wiman Little Inscription for the Family Bible The liars and the testifiers and the martyrs of water. Thaddeus, Theta, bonecancered Carla, who went out screaming being like an inverted birth. Let us say a word for all those who died of God, their hearts, we hope, a little lighter now without us in them.

Christian Wiman Ah, Ego Ah, ego, my beetle, my cockroach crawling out of the holocaust of lost keys, bad screws and what have you, how little singed you are, how almost spry, tentacling intact past the wrecks and drecks and what have you, moon-rover roving over the moon of me…