Bioluminescence in Newport Harbor
When the water glints like onyx
shushing the dock, empty
sailboats huddle and rock,
when a red-winged
blackbird tricks us
with its flare of dahlia,
... Read MoreGene Pool
They call it zero entry, the way the surround leans into the water and becomes the bottom of the pool, slowly angling deeper and deeper beneath the water’s surface. This way, toddlers can reverse their lives and, guided by their mothers, ease from dry land into a worldly womb as wet as the ones they left behind, though much colder ... Read More
Gyroscope
For a couple of years I didn’t use the rope. It was one of those revenge presents. My relationship with Melinda, the dancer, was disintegrating. She was quite something. Serious about her dance too. Said she wanted to get into Juilliard just so she could turn them down. That’s the kind of person she was. She was a year younger ... Read More
Into the Mystic
“Head up,” my father says softly as my eyes open. His dream-voice sounds just like his real voice did fifty-plus years ago. He’s not putting me on notice, giving me a heads-up; he’s telling me to sail the boat closer to the wind. Dad had been a sailor since early adolescence. He’d raced small sailboats of the Star class from ... Read More
Interview with Reuben Jackson
Reuben Jackson served as curator of the Smithsonian’s Duke Ellington Collection in Washington, D.C. for over twenty years. His music reviews have been published in the Washington Post, Washington City Paper, Jazz Times, and on NPR’s “All Things Considered.” Jackson is also an educator and mentor with The Young Writers Project. He taught poetry for 11 years at the Writer’s Center in ... Read More
Apology
Each morning she swept stars from the wood floor, cursing as the bright bits scattered, and barked whenever I’d whine. Her list of reasons why I had no right to be unhappy landed like lashes. At the open door she bent and snapped the broom’s bristles—forbade the stars to return. I didn’t ask how they got inside our room—the cracks ... Read More
In the Old Packard
Maybe a hand-me-down from Uncle B, smells like a garage. Surely he’d found it, fixed it up, tinkered with it,
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Night Blindness
When you wake me I am blind, closed around the night and faded like the quilt, born of the black
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When They Come
When they come, hold your hands above your head, don't look them in the eye, and don’t spit on their
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Everything is the Same, Only Quieter
I push my dad past trimmed plots of Bermuda lawns orderly with hedges, hawthorn bushes bordering garage after garage unopened,
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Den, the Vomitous
Isaac was in love with his T-shirt. It was pure, breathable cotton, size L, with sleeves that hit just below
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Apprenticeship
My brother & I memorized our parents’ epic – their screams & grunts – mastering that pidgin of volatility. We
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I Think I Did It Wrong
University. Waverly. I kept saying the street names in my head. Greene. Astor. So I’d know how to get back
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Child’s Play
One by one, Kate picks up photographs from the piles of mostly black-and-white shots strewn around her on her parents’
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Judy In The Sky With Toxic Masculinity
Judy invented this sport where she loaded a herd of cattle onto a cargo plane and took it up to
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Hopper Man
(“Me only cruel immortality consumes…” Alfred Tennyson, Tithonus) Grasshopper stoops; his shadow, an elephant holding a parasol, plods along achromatic
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Triplewart Seadevil
Cryptopsaras couesii Down in the body-lit night-sodden sea, somber, sub umbra, I’m this tiny restless inchling, a mere appendage,
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The Things You Wear
You stand near the arboretum gate, your hip against the ornamental rock etched with the resonant words of a conservationist.
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Interview with Maureen Pilkington
Maureen Pilkington’s fiction has appeared in anthologies, journals and magazines including The Antioch Review, Ploughshares, Puerto del Sol, Confrontation, Bridge: Art &
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Melanie’s Song by Joanna Biggar
A sequel to her 2010 novel, That Paris Year, which followed five California girls on their junior year abroad, in
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