Maryland Literary Review

Fiction Spring 2022

A Catalog of Lies

Jen Grow

A guy named Fabian tells you you’re beautiful. He says he hasn’t dated for a while and wants to know all about you. You haven’t dated for years either, but after the end of a long relationship, you’ve been trading messages with men through an online dating site. Fabian is handsome and eight years younger than you. He says he ... Read More

Fiction Spring 2022

Bark Like Skin

Jennifer Fliss

The craggy striated bark of the western red cedar felt like her mother’s arms, coated in eczema so rough, the little girl had always thought her mother might be part tree.

Her mother wasn’t there with her in the forest. Her mother was in bed, her immune system ensuring no young child with fingers sticky coated in the residue of ... Read More

Essay Spring 2022

Pulp

Kim Magowan

I used to have terrible nightmares about a giant named Jodi who had green skin and a blond bowl cut. Once, when I was four and we were living in Houston, I heard a noise, woke up, opened the curtain, and saw him. Jodi was sitting in a red convertible that he was much too big for, so he looked ... Read More

Poetry Spring 2022

Blue Jew

Eleanor Levine

I am Louis Farrakhan’s favorite Jew—a lesbian intellectual with a purple Izod sweatshirt. * I am a bilious girl on my birthday with food poisoning from ribs like Momma made. * I go to the ER. A pipe in my throat connects to Moses. All Jews connect to Moses or Freud or Einstein or Rothschild. * Me the Hebe rests ... Read More

Poetry Spring 2022

Civility in the Parking Lot

Eleanor Levine

New Jersey tar lines deconstruct one’s brain in a Volvo; the calm of an arc; your ass on a leather chair heated; a mobile phone next to you squeaking hyphens and periods. God is in relaxed mode and you do yoga or gyrate to the Ramones or phone John Hinckley Jr and ask if he has recovered from Jodie Foster ... Read More

Poetry Spring 2022

Chicago Saturdays, 1969

Sarah Browning

My mother in the crappy kitchen, before the renovation, boiling berries for jam. The kitchen is crappy so she’s painted it royal blue and it shimmers in the Chicago heat, strawberries popping on the ancient stove. On the ceiling she’s painted giant petals springing out from the one bare bulb. Oh, cast-iron sink so deep, narrow metal cabinet, counter tacked ... Read More

Poetry Spring 2022

Do I call them the lonely years

Sarah Browning

nights alone in dive bars watching baseball, sipping cheap gin? I was relieved to be alone, to loose the vigilance I’d kept over the man I’d lately left – would he uncoil his impatience, his anger: not at me / at me / later, when I thought an evening a success, we’d relaxed a bit, but no, he’d tell me, ... Read More

Mars is the Pick-Me-Up Planet

Richard Peabody

Saturday I’m between COVID shots. Retired. Nothing to do. The libraries aren’t taking book donations. So, I spend my days

Fiction Spring 2022

Interview: Suzanne Feldman

Interview by Nathan Leslie

Suzanne Feldman graduated from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 1981 and received a Masters in Creative Writing from

Interview Spring 2022

As Within So Without: & other writings by Daniel Barbiero

Reviewed by Charles Rammelkamp

“As Within So Without” Essays Arteidolia Press, 2021 $15.00, 188 pages ISBN: 978-1736998304 Daniel Barbiero’s philosophical essays on aesthetic topics

Review Spring 2022

The Gold Bullet

Sean Murphy

Warily, she placed her piece—a petite, faux-platinum number that, her nephew had joked, wouldn’t stop a squirrel much less an

Fiction Spring 2022

Storm Surge

Murali Kamma

“I wonder what happened,” Jai says, picking up the remote control. “With the hurricane, I mean. It was on the

Fiction Spring 2022

Complicity

Peter Cherches

I had just walked out of Russo’s, where I picked up some finocchiona and Sicilian primo sale cheese with black

Fiction Spring 2022

Black Mold

Ace Boggess

I never would’ve noticed were it not pointed out during my uncle’s quest for a leak that confounded many scholars

Poetry Spring 2022

Grief

Brandon C. Spalletta

Grief is a heavyweight boxer who’s trained his whole life for twelve long rounds with the masterpiece you thought you

Poetry Spring 2022

Barge

James Croal Jackson

Where I go from here, I cannot say. Stacks of uneven boxes. Manufactured forests. The power of chainsaw abused. Pull

Poetry Spring 2022

In Sunday School today my teacher said

Gale Acuff

that Jesus is the answer so I raised my hand to have some fun and she called on me and

Poetry Spring 2022

Mistakes

Doritt Carroll

there are so many mistakes to make in a day they crowd together like beans in a jar faces in

Poetry Spring 2022

Career Day, 2002

Alexander Eikenberg

A fireman I knew, the father of a friend once brought to my school his Pulaski axe: a heavy wedge

Poetry Spring 2022

Ascensions on the Blue Ridge Parkway

Barbara Westwood Diehl

A view through coin-operated binoculars, a squirming child hoisted up onto a hip Always the erasure of clouds the pale

Poetry Spring 2022

After the Hegira

Jeffrey Dieter

He comes back to the house, its unassuming frame. What the windows collected remains: some ruined crocuses, rust-dipped leaves. No

Poetry Spring 2022

Lake Incident

Fred Johnston

They continued down the quayside And I was drowning (the story’s weightier that way) Lapped into the breathing tide of

Poetry Spring 2022

A MOMENT IN OCTOBER (After Su Tung Po)

George Freek

Leaves fall in the moonlight. I watch a solitary girl stroll down the darkened street. Leaves blow like rose petals

Fiction Spring 2022

Maumee, Maumee

Terry Bohnhorst Blackhawk

Fish leap and splash, grasses’ heads toss in the wind, the bowed-over, weighted-down willows swish and sigh, and the river

Poetry Spring 2022

Follistim Pen

Toby Goostree

I unscrew the cartridge holder from the body of the pen in order to load it. I set the body

Poetry Spring 2022

Washi

Ryan E. Holman

Pull the paper at least three times: Shake it back and forth the first, Side to side the second, Back

Poetry Spring 2022