Tag: Issue 5

  • ONLY ONE

    He’s the original Adam, cable-knit sweater pulled down over his missing rib. He’s thinking about ending things with Eve—not because he doesn’t love her, I mean God, look at their history—but because he can’t remember what it was like before he had this slack fleshy gap in his bones, a tender fontanelle that seems to…

  • GRANDMA CHINOOK

    The weather forecasters called it an Arctic Dome, but those of us who lived in northwestern Wyoming that winter pronounced it colder than a well digger’s behind.  For seven days the mercury in our thermometer never ventured above zero, even at high noon.  Snow squeaked beneath our boots.  Ice draped windows so thickly one had…

  • THE FORTUNE TELLER

    The ryokan owner brings our breakfast: morning kocha tea, loose, strong and floating in our own pot, rice bread two inches thick, our own orange toaster. My mother and I pick tea shavings from our tongues, grasping at this needed taste, nostalgia in silence, studying the Zen gardens in the courtyard, the sunlight, the shadow-bodies…

  • UNDERDOG SONG

    Cicadas ambled up the tree, branches straining moonlight on their glinting shells left behind now, clinging to the bark, furrowed racetrack abandoned for the air. How the race must have changed then, above the squashed red-yellow drupes.  Think of the one  who led, euphoric in first place, only to see another soaring off, to hear…

  • BLIND DATE, PHILLIPS COLLECTION LUNCHEON OF THE BOATING PARTY (1880-81)

    She is frightened. Surely, something has happened. She has just come from somewhere where something has happened. Hands at her face, holding her spinning head. She is flushed, pinch-browed, squinting hard out onto the water. She is not alone: there are men mere inches from her mouth, simultaneously shushing and asking what has happened, shush,…

  • GARDEN PLANS

    After the doctor went over the scan of her bulbous right kidney, I carried Mom home on a jonquil-hemmed road. I offered her water and dealt out seed packets like Tarot cards. She selected arugula sugar snap peas and white icicle radishes. We decided to sow them on Saturday. We’ll save spinach and bok choy…

  • Jennifer Weiss

    Jennifer Weiss is the Executive Director of The Hope Center at Pullen and an editorial assistant for Minerva Rising Press. Her poetry appears in the North Carolina Literary Review, KAKALAK, Minerva Rising, eno Magazine and Quatrain.Fish. She was a finalist in the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival 2014- 2015 Poetry Contest and the North Carolina…

  • PHONE CALL

    When the phone rang, Connie froze as if she’d been caught, her arm elbow deep in a family size bag of Skinny Pop. No one ever called Connie, and as she stared at the offending device she wondered, ironically, what type of person still called a landline. She ignored the jangling until it ceased and…

  • THE HEIST

    Tell me the one where he tears you open like curtains, where there is never a window & he still climbs inside. How he writes letters on your walls with the soft scratching of fingers, reeds riding a wind that doesn’t know how to stop. You hear voices this way: scrape, scrape. Brock. Brock. Say…