UChicago's Oldest Literary Magazine
And of onerous monarchs with tufted wing,
Amber over chestnut, iced oak, winter’s solace they sing.
Born to languish where their starry sons fly
Born in the very brooks where they are destined to die.
Some explore mesas in sweet […]
I’m a rock.
Well, sometimes I say rock, but other times pebble feels more right.
Whatever
The point is
I look up and see your flapping […]
Today it feels as if the impulse of checking
My email on my phone has been reduced
To the firing of a single synapse maybe
That is a deadly topography
The matrices of sensation for […]
Alma sleeping beside him, he stared at the ceiling. These days the house was too quiet. Sorrow sat on his chest. Tears flowed from his eyes, soundless as the empty room across the hall. Like going away, to stay, you know, for good… Always daring, all his life he’d taken chances, faced down bullies and […]
Read More Prose: “The Grief Response” by Paul GarcíaI’m not the tell-me-your-troubles kind of bartender. I keep to myself. Stand-offish was how one drunk guy put it once — the bar held him up as he slurred through some sob-story about his wife or girlfriend or money — but I don’t know about all that. I just do my job, act as gatekeeper […]
Read More Prose: “Practice” by Matthew FianderShe wouldn’t let me kiss her except
in a Japanese garden by the river.
We went there
when snow covered the arched bridge,
the teahouse […]
“Are the living happier than
the dead?” children wonder
when they turn over a scarlet
brick and find a lost Atlantis.
There the worms […]
Every snowflake is an electric light of love, molecular
kisses tissue-thin coasting down from heaven’s
arboretum with drifts of frigid sweet alyssum
falling, falling, falling in pieces carrying remnants of serenity
and angelic peace from that snowy place […]
I keep track of the deepening circles
under my eyes
as if they were redwood rings
showing the number of nights
without sleep […]
Our house sat at the bottom of a hill,
where it all started, where we began,
the ground fertile, but the structure rotten.
It rocked and eventually fell,
the walls crashing outward toward […]
