As Ordinary as it All Appears: An Interview with Sayantani Dasgupta
Conducted by Nadia Chaney
I first met Sayantani Dasgupta seven years ago at the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference. She was sharp-tongued, self-assured, and kind of Cheshire-like. She had the subtle ability to appear and disappear during heated conversations about writing quandaries such as the responsibilities of memoir or the momentum of flash fiction. There were morning freewriting sessions at seven A.M. and she would show up like a panther, wide awake and hungry. (More …)
Blue Bird, Blue Skies
by Angie Chatman
Her name was Maria and she was beautiful. A woman knows. That primal sense of competition kicks in and you recognize that even if you had just stepped out of the beauty salon with flawless hair and makeup, wearing a designer dress, men would turn their heads and look, not at you, but at Maria. (More …)
Musselshell County Historical Society Fact Book, Appendix G: Others Who Were Here, 1908-1930
by Joe Wilkins
It may surprise you to know that some of the early residents of Musselshell County eventually left our prairie paradise. Their reasons were legion; their counsel most often their own. Many were laboring men of little skill or motivation and thus cursed to blow where the whims of the wind would take them; some were families ill-suited to the demands of these Montana plains or beset by misfortune; and others, though few, were lone women sadly adrift without benefit of father, brother, or husband. (More …)
Wishbone
by Karen Babine
The secret to chicken soup is to start with a chicken—a whole one, three to four pounds. Chicken soup is a pot of deliberate attention, a thing that contains everything that you and the chicken have to give, so if you have a heavy Dutch oven, maybe a vintage Le Creuset you found at the thrift store that is the color of faded sunshine and that you have named Estelle for no good reason other than the pot needed a name, use it.(More …)
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Interrupted
by Karen Houppert
Sometimes the rending apart of parent and child is abrupt, sometimes gradual.
Always, it is painful.
In my family, it happens with dogged, painful insistence at age thirteen. Thirteen is the beginning of the end. It was the last year I spent with my father. It is the age my son is now.
What is it about thirteen, I wonder. I study him. (More …)
Soul Singing
by Robert Wrigley
In the autumn of 1973, I had a stack of poetry books checked out from the library at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, where I would complete a BA in English the following summer. The stack of books (all of them those familiar slender volumes) was about seven times the height of the meager pile of poetry books I actually owned. This pained me. I was enamored, enraptured, and swept away by poetry. (More …)
Songs last the longest…
by Moya Cannon
(for Susan Hiller)
my mother, who could not sing, told me.
As a young woman, she helped garner
the last grains of Tyrone Irish. (More …)
Invention
by Maxine Chernoff
“Daylight disbanded the phantom crew.” —Edith Wharton
The sentimental is a rumor,
inexorable memory
of cottonwood seed
left in its husk, of
a grief spent down to dust. (More …)
“Runaway thought, I wanted to write it; instead, I write that it has run away” —Blaise Pascal
by Maxine Chernoff
Not the day for the false alarm,
the robin-breasted moment,
the double entendre in the mirror. (More …)
Everything, Including Us, Gets Old
by Grace Curtis
I
At night we rolled up the lawn around the house
plucking out all the vowels, saying
each one aloud as we’d been taught
to do as children. (More …)
The Moon is a Paper Lantern, Arm of the Boy Who Carries it Tired
by Alison Hicks
I used to find my dog’s hair in bird’s nests,
soft layer woven inside the twigs.
I release hair from my hairbrush out my bedroom window. (More …)
Étude for the Cello, Late on an August Night
by Alison Hicks
The pads of the fingers on my left hand
are raw and numb at the same time.
I press my fingernails into their flesh. (More …)
Yellow Bird
by Alison Hicks
I want to believe in a world beneath this one.
The bird that flies across the lawn
is a messenger, that if I follow her
in my mind, I will come to a door (More …)
Territory of Men
by Jami Macarty
The café customer mutters a body part and a man’s name
Plastic lids startle
the floor’s scuffed wood
A man comes in
A man goes out
A window captures
the one looking in (More …)
As If We Were Solid and Did Not Go On Forever
by Maria Maggi
(for Michael Wilson (1985–) and Jacob Windsor (1975–1992)
Michael, heaven’s minion, pillar of light,
my child of iron will, golden enthusiasm,
and more iron will, it isn’t fair (More …)
Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear
by Michael Wasson
I wake to find my name
gone as another lost night I want
to salvage: & only to have
its dark teeth sinking
into my skin—: you enter me
through an opening in the sky of
the body like a face (More …)
Years Later, na’plax̣, in the Yard, Asks Me to Rename Him
by Michael Wasson
At the foot of
this mountain you
are the boy alone
again: there is
a word rusted
to the back of
your throat: a deer (More …)
I Say After–Rain, You Say hahalx̣páawisa
by Michael Wasson
I call out to you like a / You whose flesh is cleared out / from our ghosted
shadows to the tightened lips of / the horizon. There you are / at the cathedral (More …)