by Nicholas Johnson The red of repeated questions and their red answers. The stacked red of chips on green cloth. Fat chance. The red shift of stars, love retreating, color of debt, red-eye express. The sick red of light through closed lids, the red sweep of the second-hand blurred lines of where you have been […]
Issue: Summer 2021
Stepping into the Sea
by Maria Lisella You let me, your stepmother, Take your hand to walk into the surf, let slippery seaweed wrap around your ankles like emerald ribbons. We step on the edge of lacey waves that feel like butter on hot skin. You hold back, your mother’s fear of the sea, fear of me, sways you. She warns you Yemaya, the Santeria god, will swallow you […]
Bland Fanatics and White Crusades: A Review of Bland Fanatics: Liberals, Race, and Empire by Pankaj Mishra
by Katherine Judith Anderson In 1884, a white American named Lyman Stewart founded Union Oil of California. To get his start, he’d leveraged the American “rule of capture,” which granted drillers the right to siphon out any oil they discovered below the surface, no matter who owned the land itself. By 1920, Union Oil owned […]
Plight & Power: A Kurdish Woman’s Journey in Daughters of Smoke and Fire by Ava Homa
Review by Holly Mason Growing up in a Kurdish-American home, I only had my mother’s stories of Kurdistan and Iraq as a frame of reference for that land and the Kurdish experience and struggle. She described pleasant nights, sleeping on an upper courtyard in the fresh air with her siblings; her mother interpreting dreams […]
Magritte’s Aerial Imagination
by Kimmo Rosenthal Everything comes alive when contradictions accumulate. —Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space …no such combination of scenery exists as the painter of genius may produce. —Edgar Allan Poe, The Domain of Arnheim René Magritte’s genius lies in his ability to transcend and subvert artistic convention in order to envision a hitherto unimaginable […]
Cora’s Kayak
by Cari Oleskewicz Cora’s kayak is balanced on top of Andy’s compact car. From my seat on the passenger side, I watch its pointy yellow tip, imagining it flying off the roof like a javelin. This kayak has been a fixture at Andy’s house for the entire three-and-a-half years of our relationship. It is faded […]
You Turn Me On!
by Alan Swyer Some of our greatest music was created in strange ways. A Ray Charles classic came to life when the manager of a theater feared that the audience would tear out the seats if Ray, who’d run out of material, didn’t take the stage again. Instructing his band to follow his lead, Ray […]
Semicolon
by Karen DeGroot Carter If I was a punctuation mark, I’d be a semicolon; I can never leave well enough alone. Like if a stranger sits next to me and Ellie on a stool in a coffee shop and says so much as hello, I’ll tell them my life story. Which life story I tell […]
The New Moon In the Old Moon’s Arms
by David Hallock Sanders A thin crescent moon hung low above the other apartments. The bright arc cradled the moon’s faint, red shadow. The new moon in the old moon’s arms, he thought. That’s what his father used to call it. Terry’s head throbbed. His 60-year-old body ached. He hadn’t taught a yoga class in […]
What Happened to My Parents After They Gave Me Up
by Shoshauna Shy She met her true soulmate under a beach umbrella on Nantucket Island, felt like she dodged a bullet, but eventually Soulmate returned to his wife. He took up with a Finnish bricklayer who already had custody of a couple of kids, and neither of them ever came around to liking him. She […]