by Alice Lowe 1. Lena Gart was born on September 14, 1915. Esther Ethel Greenglass was born exactly two weeks later, on September 28. Both were daughters of early 20th-century Jewish immigrants, both of their mothers from Galicia, then a Polish/Russian border region now part of Ukraine. One raised in New York’s Lower East Side, […]
Article Category: Essay
Catalogue of Things Buried in Your Neighbors’ Yard
by Peter Soucy I. purple swing Early visits to Ian and Cullen’s included lifting up pieces of their bluestone walkway to look for stashes of red-backed and blue-spotted salamanders. Your mom never let your brother and you get a dog, so reptiles and amphibians were the only living things you liked to touch. Their slime […]
Are We Artists? Or Fundraisers?
by Christopher Hirschmann Brandt Since I began working with Medicine Show Theatre, and ever more since the deaths of the company’s two founders in 2003 and 2015, the job that has brought me the greatest amount of tzuris is writing grant applications. I can’t say that’s taken the most time, since building sets, maintaining the […]
Cover Story
by Margo Taft Stever Many poems in my chapbook, The Lunatic Ball (Kattywompus Press, 2015) and my following full-length collection, Cracked Piano (CavanKerry Press, 2019) delve into the definition of sanity, and both collections include several found poems created from letters written by my great grandfather Peter Rawson Taft when he was institutionalized at the […]
Lady Vanessa
by Andrew Sarewitz I finished Michelle Obama’s autobiography. It took me the summer. That’s not a statement on the quality of the memoir. I haven’t been finding enough time to read. After placing Becoming in my claw footed ebony and glass library, I went to one of the piles of dormant, unread books that crowd […]
from: DAVID’S TREE: Escaping Skin (Chapter 10 of Swampitude: Escapes with the Congaree)
By Quitman Marshall “And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water…” –Psalms 1:3 I was there to seek and to honor a shared past we are still barely speaking about. Certain things have made us, certain things with no relation to the gushing of popular rhetoric that moats life in […]
The Arrivals, NYC, 1951: from, Daughters of the Stone
by Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa By the time the plane landed at Idlewild International Airport in New York City, the children had fallen asleep out of pure exhaustion and Elena was totally drained. As hard as she had tried to arrive at their new home in their best clothes and brightest smiles, a six-hour flight with a […]
Examples of Unclear Writing … Letters from Applicants for Public Assistance
Reported by Kallistos 1. I am sending my marriage certificate and six children. I have sevn but, one died which was baptized on a half sheet of paper. 2. I am writing the Welfare Dept. to say my baby was born two years old, when do I get my money. 3. Mrs. Jones has not […]
Trump talks like a stand-up comic, but the joke is on American people
by Marc Jampole At first listen, Donald Trump’s speaking style when he eschews the teleprompter seems chaotically free form, as if he tossed a bunch of tweets into one of his MAGA caps and picked a few out, one at a time, and read them out loud, not bothering to supply connective material or an […]
POETRY AND THE POLITICS OF AIRY NOTHING
by Robert Klein Engler “Blue Head” Painting by Robert Klein Engler During the waning days of the Republic, with so many political scandals in the news and the advent of a fundamental change in America advanced by a fabricated president, it may seem trivial to ask, “What is the role of American poetry in the […]