UChicago's Oldest Literary Magazine
Her body is rotting. Allison knows this, just as she knows the four chambers of the heart—two atria, two ventricles—and how to stitch a simple continuous suture. When she slices open the cadaver, y-shape, petals of flesh blooming underneath her fingers, her advisor praises her steady hands. Beneath her mask, Allison smiles. There was a […]
Read More Prose: “something that knows it’s dead,” by Isabel YacuraSnow leopards are graceful animals with soft fur
the students type over and over again as well as
They live in the high rugged mountains of Tibet.
Does each word imprint like the leopard’s paw
set down in stealth on the cold white world where
I am looking out the window with my classical on as I ponder the rigmaroles of existence discussing such with the most fascinating person I know.
Every time I feel I’ve made a valid point or observation during my ongoing convo I like to whip off my glasses to add further emphasis
while highlighting a point that’s been made salient and to add further punctuating resonance
All night (when isn’t it night?) the flat fields sleep unsound,
the megacities spit and thrum with their overdrive generators,
babies shawled in naked terror howl for 24-hour shifts in test chambers.
Earth is round the way a cattle prod is round.
Electricity churns and spits, sprinting through Hell World, block after block.
Read More Poetry: “Prison Planet,” by Zack CarsonIn the winter of XXXX’s seventeenth year, bone cancer put her beloved mother to rest under the hospital bed’s white sheets, the same winter her dog chased a rabbit into the woods and never came home, froze to death in the night’s snow, a comforter that only brought more cold, so quick and thick the […]
Read More Prose: “Miss December,” by Dominic VItiA poet I know lives on Noyes Street.
Not Dogma Drive
where what we see
is what we get,
but a neighborhood of wavicles, oscillations, uncertainties,
His final breaths
served as a reminder
that dying had been kept
from me all these years: Yes,
I wept, but more
because of the ecstatic
unbraiding that accompanied
the irregular pattern
of rapid gasps and
apnea
innervates, selfsame bodies
half-built causeways birth still water
sunk the veiled North
Sea moss, our love: a cutlass sharpened
water-ice winnows visions of solemn service
While I was at Dave’s wake, all I could think about was the last time he got laid. Since graduation, he’d been on three or four dates, but none of them really went anywhere. This thought just cropped up in my mind, not that it brought me any particular joy, but seeing that it wasn’t […]
Read More Prose: “Don’t Be Afraid to Forget,” by Griffin GudaitisReally, the old guy impersonated
himself, the rolling eye and teeth-bared grimace
straight out of silent movies. He’d known
vaudeville too, and, in the old sense,
burlesque. Gestures from Yiddish theater—
Euphony Journal 