UChicago's Oldest Literary Magazine
He has been living on the edge of the desert for nearly fourteen years. There is very little to distract him. A truck stop and a gas station, about a mile down the road. A small strip of shops a further mile in the same direction. North of there, nothing for a good four hundred […]
Read More Prose: “The End of Craftsmanship,” by Arthur Mandalfor Bernice Gardner, may she RIP
Ringed around the rosy twilight park,
A cocoon on a leaf falls through the dark.
It lands on wet asphalt streets above the bulwark
“Weltpolitik” is the runner-up of Euphony‘s 2025 prose contest, which has a theme of “Endings.” Sophomore year was relieved by a few brief trips to her in DC or me in Chicago. But generally, I drifted into a naive possessiveness as our relationship, conceived in long-distance, continued to be long-distance. Our fights made no sense, […]
Read More Prose: “Weltpolitik,” by Noah LeeNight relaxes its eastern hand
Dawn inches forth, Quiet a vigil keeps.
The house about me now is still.
I sort through words while my lady yet sleeps.
The ceramic Aztec mask on my wall is one of my few physical reminders of a Chilean uncle who died in exile in Mexico City almost two decades ago, two weeks after I informed him of the death of his favorite sister, my mother, some two thousand miles away. The other reminders are fading images […]
Read More Prose: “Archaeology,” by Ronald FinkI.
In the fall morning sky, high above the white glaze
of the brown mountain range, a raven would fly.
She’d flutter then plunge through the dawn light and fog
over fields filled with songs of the killdeer and dove –
One unseasonably warm Saturday in late January Val’s phone rang. He picked up the receiver and said an unsuspecting “Hello.” Carrie said, simply, “Hi.” He’d thought she had damned him by now for his silence, his necessary relinquishment. “How are you?” she asked. “Uh . . . well, I think.” He smelled roses, the scent […]
Read More Prose: “The Glimmering Woods,” by Richard JacobsBustling check-in desk, suited men. Orderly queue –
duty free sake. Vexed boy humpfed away.
Eleventh hour tannoy inspirits discomfort. She lays
Japanese Red Army’s blasting cap. Oyster-white
peripheries shock to black
I came to Imlil to return to myself, to put an end to the nervous estrangement that had taken hold of me in the windless dust of Marrakech. That which cannot be seen nor grasped, and thus cannot be proven, is there nonetheless. I swear it. It’s as if the whole city sucks and exsufflates […]
Read More Prose: “Djinns of the River,” by Jordan GabrielHe puts himself
at the head
of the long table
in front of the
killer whale-sized
Euphony Journal 