UChicago's Oldest Literary Magazine
Really, 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—
The first time I saw Walter he was coming out of building across the street from my office. He looked nervous, the way he swung his head around one way and then the other as he locked the door and hurried up the sidewalk, pushing long, black strands of hair off his face and glancing […]
Read More Prose: “Walter,” by Gary KimballThe unnamed narrator coats the stones like rain. He says: There is logos inside the logo, logic in the log, but watch the long-sleeved willow in autumn as it sways: willow, hold your suede over the colossus of loss, your shadow strides the forest seeking seeking. He says: Where the blackbirds fire songs a story […]
Read More Poetry: “Story,” by Giles GoodlandThe Oneironautics Conference was scheduled to begin at eight o’clock Saturday morning in a city two hundred miles north of the town where I lived. So Friday night after work I set out, driving until I became too tired, then turned onto a dirt road and parked in the approach to a farmer’s field. I […]
Read More Prose: “The Oneironautics Conference,” by Nemo Aratoryou think of hot evenings watching cottontails scatter
at the yip of waking coyotes
you think of watching clouds of heat lightning
glimmer like pearly gates
you think of baseball fishing in the pond
Startled awake, I left my frayed brain
resting in its head-case as I floated away
up to the ceiling, out of the long window
into the northern hardy redbud just outside
beginning its flower, tight pink nodules
In Newark, spring opens its mouth, yawns
across the Manhattan skyline, like a promise.
Yesterday, I asked what love was beyond
laughter skipping on broken vinyls, hands
on the steering wheel, beyond umbrellas. I
I couldn’t believe they’d put all of us into this cramped basement room with stone walls and tiny windows too high to see out of, but maybe that was part of the therapy. A dozen people looked up from their chairs at Dr. Ward who stood on this little platform, jerking his arms like some sci-fi […]
Read More Prose: “Yellow Shift,” by Mary LewisAt any one time there are scores of houses in the Grosse Pointe area that sit empty, serving time as silent citadels of the neighborhood. They’re owned by family estates whose administrators diligently pay the taxes and heating expenses year after year. They never dream of putting the property up for sale and risk having […]
Read More Prose: “Interloper From Another Neighborhood” by Douglas StewardThe sugar maples survived the taps
their viscous blood dripping into galvanized pails […]
Euphony Journal 