MLR

Like livestock, we walk the steel maze
to our impersonal deaths, admit design

is a murderer; there is no exit that doesn’t
reduce us to beast, just our bodies’ meat

dragging us down. Afraid of your dwindle
toward dotage, I want longevity like

the Laysan albatross. Her courtship spans
nearly a decade before ... Read More

Home, boy / Home, boy / Everybody needs a home.
– Iggy Pop

I.

The very rich may differ from the non-rich, as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in a short story, and not just because they have more money, as Ernest Hemingway wrote in a story of his own. The very poor differ from the non-poor, ... Read More

Pamela Murray Winters’ first full-length collection of poetry, The Unbeckonable Bird, was published by FutureCycle Press in 2018. Her poems have appeared in Fledgling Rag, Gargoyle, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, The Gettysburg Review, Beltway Poetry, and numerous other journals and anthologies. She received an MFA in poetry from Vermont College of Fine Arts and was awarded ... Read More

The sidewalk is sterilized white.
I could eat off its sunlight.
People creep along it like spiders

who could shrink in the heat, leave
this world without their dark webs
I watch this from a window

in an air-conditioned room, a screen
in front of me telling me who is dead,
from bombs, from guns, knives, stars.

I don't ... Read More

Down to the rotting
forest floor, little shocks
of sun, panty-pink,

slip below crowns
of simple-leaved trees.
Green ousts peach,

claiming branches. Layers
of duff drift beneath trees’
heart-murmur utterance,

under the dieback,
witches’ broom, sad trinity
of cloud, tree, cloud.

A filth fly passes through
the low charnel house
... Read More

On Saturday morning, 12/21/63, a date with no prime number unless you count the 2 in 12, the 2 in 21, or the 3 in 63, Richie, my thirteen year old brother, and I, at age eleven, acting on our instinctual understanding of the privilege of seniority as our parents corralled us into the back of their Ford Falcon, ... Read More

When my wife of these last thirty-nine years kicked me out of the house and I quoth "for being a dipshit" the week before the fourth of July, I holed up in a little camper on the other side of town just so I wouldn't have to lay eyes on the heifer. "What's wrong with you?" she demanded to ... Read More

The Liars’ Asylum by Jacob Appel
Reviewed by Charles Rammelkamp

“The Liars’ Asylum”
Short Stories
Black Lawrence Press, 2017
16.95, 180 pages
978-1625579751

The eight stories that make up Jacob Appel’s The Liars’ Asylum are like eight episodes of Seinfeld on steroids, zany plots involving feckless characters whose motives are never so pure, often questionable. All of the stories are ... Read More

March 14, 1983

Dear Sir or Madam:

Forgive the vague salutation. I could not determine the current president of the IBTC, so I am hoping this letter reaches the correct party.

I want to share with you the story of my grandmother, who would have been a staunch supporter, probably a ... Read More