Archive for the ‘Prose & Cons’ Category

If I could sacrifice my present to the ideal, I’d want a window seat as my shelter. Quiet and warm. Quite warm. I’d spend my minutes watching eyelashes catch snowflakes and puddles crack under galoshes. I digress to stand atop the cushions. Spinning and looking up, I blind myself. This roof has leaks. All I [...]

(The Astronaut Sons, Strangled by their Fathers in Preparation) i. The Ausable River, 2010 There have been times lately when I’ve imagined drowning, and where it would happen best, all the places the old men in my life tried to teach me to swim. But it never worked, never took, and instead all I could [...]

By Megan McGinnes She doesn’t know how she let herself get to this point. Jen’s hair, originally tightly wrapped in her usual bun, is free like a cascading waterfall of chocolate brown over her shoulders. She chucks her cell phone into the nearby wood. The wind dances around the bottom of her dingy, black skirt, [...]

By Greg Burns Memorial january third tet offensive mistakes, this is bullshit, this is horror this is ground beef violence, fought in the forever wet. in the dark and the ghosts and the ghosts, dropped jellied gasoline and sprayed death into the thick green, into the antique jungle, and tired hills. and now your children [...]

peeling back layers old rotten seasoned skin scraping away old membrane in place for the new the untold story secret center core prize not worth keeping a pestilence, burden what’s left of the vertebrae just bare naked-ass bones splitting to pieces shattering like pots and pans in the museum to display works of this crazed [...]

By Kristiina Korpus Everything was still. Only the occasional drifting, whispering wind across the open window told me of a world outside the sweet warmth of your breath. Sheets rustle as I slide across the cool cotton to press closer and nestle into the crook of your arm, which is so perfectly suited, as if [...]

By Colleen Cunha Two thirds of the time, meaningful events in your life won’t happen on a single digit date. The next time it’s the first, or second, or third of a month, remember that chances are, nothing exciting is going to happen to you. It will eventually become the tenth, then the eleventh, then the [...]

By Emily Brown They who float about the day seamlessly lazing down a river where their comatose minds cook the vegetables within their Ralph Lauren cotton polo t-shirts and their grinning eyes water as they take another hit from the cheap shit they bought two months ago. Hoot and holler, romp and round they fling [...]

By Bart Comegys There is a background hum to this Kodak moment, the push-pull we all feel at the gate of a Maryland cemetery. Close on a coffee mug—     World’s Best Dad,     it might have read— we interred in a low stone wall to fade out with the seasons. Wide on [...]

By Simi Landau Lindisfarne We call it Lindisfarne because we are the only ones who still know what that means. We are like them, the monks copying manuscripts of old, or anyway we try to be. None of us are monks, of course—this time, like the last, some of the clergy were even in on [...]