Tag: Issue 10

  • Stubbornness and Luck

    At age 14, I wrote my first poem—an awful sequence of rhyming couplets that I originally began in a half-baked attempt to convince a schoolmate to leave the guy she was sleeping with and resume dating my bleak, virginal self. Aside from yielding a horrible poem, and aside from drawing no response at all from…

  • Marcus Jackson

    Marcus Jackson’s debut full-length collection of poems, entitled Neighborhood Register, was released in 2011, and his second book-length collection, Pardon My Heart, was published by TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press in 2018. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Harvard Review, The New York Times and The Cincinnati Review, among many other publications. Marcus lives with…

  • Morning Coffee

    Morning Coffee

    Following the curve of the Great Lawn   I turn towards your public bed   The bench with the plaque from the Levy family, remembering loving parents   The wooden frame of the Delacorte Theater throwing a shadow blanket over you   Your college coat, graduated into frayed hope   I sit at your feet,…

  • How to Be

    How to Be

    A needle and thread: Imagine yourself in your hand, loving what you want to mend. That’s easy. What’s hard is pulling yourself through.   A mirror: Be a backwards Susanna. Watch old men stroke their beards while you bathe. Learn to love them. They are your wet nurse, your supple, your seethe.   An ecstatic:…

  • Rebecca Cross

    Rebecca Cross has an MA in creative and critical writing from the University of Sussex. She works as an editor in New England, where she lives with her partner and one very spoiled cat. Her work has appeared in The Woven Tale Press, Always Crashing, Breath and Shadow, Monstering, and other publications.

  • Temporary Dwellers

    Temporary Dwellers

    With this new girl, I figure the best way to keep at things is to pretend she is related to me. This is not some implausible scenario. We are Hawaiian-Japanese-Haole, the both of us, with wiry black hair and skin the shade of overturned coral. Plus, I have a magnificent family tree with wide, capacious…

  • Megan Kakimoto

    Megan Kakimoto is an emerging writer who graduated from Dartmouth College in 2015. She currently lives in her hometown of Honolulu, Hawaii, where she exercises her creative brain as a content editor for a local PR agency. Temporary Dwellers is the title piece of her short story collection, which is a work in progress.

  • Music, Darts, and Other Gifts

    Atlantic, Chess, Stax   Frankie Crocker and WBLS   Voices shattering windows   You gave those gifts to me   No Wednesday night CBS suburban twin bed brotherly scuffle   This was Brooklyn hot knife edge balance   My eyes sweating fear watching your fingers dance along the blade   D train wheels wailing call…

  • The Water of Life

      CHARACTERS:   LEAH           a preacher’s kid and recent high school graduate; female   CARRIE         her slightly older secret girlfriend; female     TIME:          the end of summer     PLACE:         a church attic A candlelit church attic. Amid scattered relics (a stray pew or two, dusty stacks of old hymnals, and so…