Tag: Issue 15

  • Leonard Finds God in a Panel Van

    Lights up: One-Armed-Kenny sits in his window-less panel van, drumming the fingers of his one good hand on the steering wheel. An unlit cigarette hangs from his lips. Leonard approaches. Kenny steps out of the panel van, the cigarette still hanging from his lips.   KENNY You’d be Leonard? LEONARD Kenny? KENNY That’s right. LEONARD…

  • Emergency Contact

    CHARACTERS JULIAN, mid-twenties, male-identifying, Bryce’s live-in boyfriend BRYCE, mid-twenties, female-identifying, Julian’s live-in girlfriend NURSE, any age, ethnicity, or gender; working the late-shift (Lights up. A hospital emergency room, in some city. A few seats, paired together. A small table with some magazines. It’s late, maybe midnight: We hear sounds of ambulances, doctors being paged, beeping…

  • For Life

    Family I was too young to know these things. They were my big, beautiful and exciting teenage stepsisters. I had inherited them overnight when our mothers fell in love and moved us all in together to that apartment on 15th street with the tall ceilings and steep winding stairs that led to a sunny patch…

  • Signed With Love

    I am staring down at my grandmother’s sunken face.   She wears her FitBit on her wrist, the same amethyst-filled rings she always wore, and her hair is spiked like usual. Only today, the tips of her hair are purple. “Do you like it?” my mother asks between sniffles. I nod my head. “She always…

  • Words From a Midwest Farm Wife

    for a traveling circus acrobat   You swing here from the East where nothing is dusty — just diesel and domes. Where church spires are syringes flushed from earth like strung-out doves, pinpricked vessels of stupor. Here, cows cluster in gangs. They chaw and low. I wish you’d unhook my blouse, sewn from spit and…

  • In the Stairwell of the Museum of Modern Art

    “I will die completely cured.” -Salvador Dali On our last night we stared for five minutes at van Gogh’s Skull of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette & I asked if he meant it as an anti-smoking lesson. Libby laughed, her hair like Clouds -era Joni Mitchell buoyant as her shoulders shook. We spent that summer…

  • Bear Spotted in Delmar

    headline from a small-town newspaper   I imagine your breath smells — though I’ve never seen you close enough to sniff you, or even wave to you from a window of a car, piloted by me or another daylight driver. Though once, long ago, at summer camp, I saw a horse wipe its dripping snot…

  • Camerawoman: Livened Roux (Biloxi, Mississipi)

    I was eighteen when my grandfather gave me the vintage 1974 Leica M4 he bought the year I was born. I hardly took shots with it; I was still afraid of everything then, of breaking that precious hardware my grandfather spent so much money on. Afraid of losing it to the St. Bernard-faced thief skulking…

  • A Walk in Mercado de la Merced

    I went from market to market for years, because Mexico is in its markets – Pablo Neruda inhale   fried pig skin peppers tortillas dirt car tires                                               cigarette smoke dry wood violin strings…