Then turning to the spirit once again, I said: “Francesca, what you suffer here melts me to tears of pity and pain. But tell me: in the time of your sweetest sighs by what appearances found love the way to lure you to his perilous paradise?” –The Inferno, Dante, Canto V, Circle Two I. Francesca […]

We know you’ve been waiting, and soon your patience be rewarded: The Winter 2011 issue is off to the printers and will be available very, very shortly! Watch out in the next couple of days for the release of the PDF on this website. In the meantime, enjoy a sneak preview from the issue, the […]

i. In The Elevator I heard a rumbling. I thought the other guy heard it too, the old man with the shopping bag, wearing a sweater vest and a hat that used to have some kind of special name when he was younger, before my time— fisherman’s cap. No, sandcatcher. Something like that. It was […]

There are dead men in the bushes, she thinks, right by where I walk the dog. Dead rich men killed by goblin boys. Thin, wiry boys, strung out on greed and miscellaneous wanga. Breath burned by that crazy smoke. Lips, cracked and dry, marked with tender pipe sores. Smelling a sweet, plumy scent like a […]

I sent my guinea pigs ahead of me with the friend of a friend. He was going to Portland and came to pick them up on Friday afternoon in a corroded green station wagon that was missing a fender. There was barely enough room in the trunk, on account of the mountains of old books, […]

A story of our post-9/11 Great Depression. This piece is an eery and all-too-telling portrait of today’s Americana. —The Editors The laundry, off a side street, has a small sign over the front door that says Capeti & Brothers. It’s a large, two-story building with no windows. From inside comes the roar of machines.

In my half-sleep, I hear the tattling sounds of a key unlocking the front door, a tipsy stumble up the stairs, the soft hush of the bathroom door closing, and then the adolescent tell of muffled retching. I surface slowly from unconsciousness, exasperated but relieved that whatever escapade my daughter Caro has been up to […]

“I don’t want to know what it was ‘like’, I want to know what it was.” When the detective with the crooked jaw and prom king blue eyes says this to me, I want to punch him in the throat.  Apparently, he lacks an appreciation for metaphor because what I said was “it was like […]