Tag: Issue 14

  • TROUT

    It’s not ok to ask my dad questions One of his teeth fell out and I try to see what’s behind it He opens his mouth to swear and a shot of whiskey falls out and spills onto my knee but I’m driving and it keeps me alert He replaces his tooth with a cigarette…

  • You Can’t Take It With You

    My father loses touch with the world we can see after he cleans out the last drawer. After worker comps comes in and the last bill goes out paid. After he has written down every login and the first four characters of passwords. After the trees are pruned, the rosemary and cilantro clipped back. The…

  • To Begin/Nights In

    I can feel his close wet breath on my neck as warm clings to his saliva and seeps into my pores causing my blood to sway just a bit more we move silent as all else becomes loud with rhythm and voice as they creep around the room demanding / failing for attention hardwood eyes,…

  • Campfire Story

    You are a campfire and the bear in the woods we were warned about. That VHS tape with all the white lines. You are the overplayed movie about the campers who befriend a wild bear by sheer magic and only one of them gets eaten. You are the berries in the bear’s stomach the eaten…

  • Daughterland

    To be eldest is to be the sentence before the trial. Even the exodus left me to wreck and conquer. All for a heritage of lack. I’ve ruined, drunk, and promised. Botched my anthems. I was not born here, I could never. I’ve had my own zip code for years now. I am tired. Mine…

  • Migratory and Resident

    “The thing is,” Jacob said, “I just don’t want to be here.” “Well, it’s not really a choice, is it?” “Everything’s a choice.” There was honking, and the siblings looked up to see a dozen geese coming in for a landing, wings scooped back, pressing the air behind them, webbed feet stretched wide and peddling…

  • Tell Me Again About Tesseract

    I wake up suspecting my horse is dead. I stand at my kitchen window and drink a glass of water looking out over the front yard.  Everything is bland in weak early morning light. Patches of snow still dominate. It’s April. It’s a consistent miserable. I know I need to put my boots on and…

  • The Fine Art of Being Someone Else

    When I first started working as a ghostwriter, people (and by people I mean only writers) often asked me what it was like or how it was different from writing fiction for… And they often would struggle to finish that sentence. “Myself?” I asked. I generally told them I didn’t know the answer to that…

  • Joseph Cuomo

    For many years, Joseph Cuomo was the Director of Queens College Evening Readings (www.qcreadings.org), a literary reading series he started in 1976. He has also debated Jerry Falwell on CNN, interviewed China’s most prominent dissident before the massacre in Tiananmen, and produced an award-winning radio documentary on American Fundamentalism, broadcast in the U.S., Canada, and…