I used to go in every day at six for shipment shift, which is where you take the boxes off the truck and sort everything, first by department, then color, and finally, size: when I was done the racks looked so neat, tiny pink cargo shorts on one end and big ones on the other. […]
Ink skips and runs. Letters expand in bulbous shapes, merging and growing and bleeding like a tumor that can’t be stopped. I see that my multi-chromatic gel ink, it turns out, does not have the resilience of, say, a regular old Bic ballpoint when faced with water submersion. The toilet seat in our Newark hotel room frames wet smudgy pages and an image of an oak tree pressed into leather in ribbed and raised edges.
I’m in the principal office for giving this boy
a knuckle tap to the temple & his mama there
and my mama ain’t. The principal ask what
happened, say ladies first. Smile. So I say I
was wearing my gym shorts & minding my own
Our current issue features fiction, poetry, and artwork from: George Abraham, El Williams III, Therí A Pickens, Jessie Roy, Salawu Olajide, Heather Heckman-McKenna, David Dodd Lee, and many more.
This project was supported [in part] by the Ohio Arts Council, which receives support from the State of Ohio and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Throughout I Hold a Wolf By the Ears, Laura van den Berg’s new collection of short stories, the reader finds bits of evidence that something devastating has happened. “The bartender asked me to tell him my story, and I describe the places I have lived. Eight cities in 10 years. Many different jobs. Few possessions […]
Marathons echo across decades and centuries in Noé Álvarez’s debut book Spirit Run. He tells the story of the 6,000-mile marathon he undertook at age 19 with Peace and Dignity Journeys (PDJ) — a First Nations/Native American movement in which participants run across North America to rekindle connections with their cultures, communities, and homelands. Álvarez interweaves […]
