I was here before you and you and youse especially. When there was room to hide on downwind side of brownstone stoop or in the alley by Carmine’s where me and Eddie doo-wopped, doo-wopped. I owned the street. It was wild then feral, forest, lamppost trees offa parking lot steppes. and we were the wolves […]

My brother was the cowboy, I the Indian. Stumping his Stick horse in crazy zigzags He dug up dirt. Once I stabbed The ground with my knife. Nicked his ear. He grew industrious, mowed the lawn In neat squares, uprooted weeds–wild- Flowers–built a plywood fort Under a weathered oak whose branches I climbed to watch, […]

From between toppled logs, spider legs and mouse droppings spill, as wood downed once again falls like fate, and I prepare to rebuild. Scanning the wreckage, I search for a catch to release the base row committed to ripening in place. The rotten logs must be wrestled loose, carted to the deep woods to be […]

A by himself crow is picking at the bark on a log on top of a rain wet woodpile, black feathers glinting white, an allover misting of december rain on christmas lights— this incarnation as viewed from my office window— a father-forsaken shadow taking flight among us, lonely moving.  

Brave new world when this mustachioed, tousle-haired old geezer met this brash young rich kid with the slicked spikes and soul patch, mister ennuied-with-the-world begat the devil-may-care millionaire, and Paige typesetters melted into West Egg moonshine. He put down the three martinis and clamped on a New England hard-hat, then went out frothing foam, having […]

It starts with the changing of a light bulb. Continues with the putting of jackets on hangers, the closing of a closet door. The Teflon flakes off in the pan, saturates the day with carcinogens. Scrub it, rinse it, dump it down the drain. Cultivate that blackened bottom taste. How well the household chores agree […]

As a preview of our upcoming Spring Issue, we are happy to share with you a recording of one of the featured poems: “Cash for Clunkers” by Philip Fried. Please press the link below to hear our Fiction Editor, Levi Foster, read this poem (Note that the recording is somewhat quiet, so you may have […]

sizzling acrobat, you try the wire from pine to pine. potential flashforward, your claws cut like scimitars across the line yet you know nothing of capacitors, of relays and dynamos, or how we use dinosaurs’ bones to make our debauched suns glow. but you know about flux and resistance: the lean of a limb, the […]