After Mario Kart 1: You are rocket start on a Peach Beach, bump bitches you pass by, banana slipstream, revving and swerving; mushroom drift. 2: You are cool contender, transforming into Bullet Bill, avoiding bob-omb blasts,… Continue reading
for Taylor Baldwin’s The Oracle [W]hen I look at that of which I may regard myself as the imaginary possessor, I fix upon what would give me pleasure in my average moments. .… Continue reading
I thought I was done with fish tired of the pull and scrape but if I walk through a fishery with a man who is still my husband just seven years older than… Continue reading
A lot of people live in New Jersey, New York, the tri-State area, and many of them are fine, and by fine, I mean getting by quite all right, eating meals, working the… Continue reading
While the fire is snapping and roaring, I should stay out here with the grackles who dropped in this morning to investigate the bird feeder. I should stay to watch the leaves fall… Continue reading
As we came up the sideroad, they could have been mistaken by morning rain for tufts of cloud left on a knoll, white as heaven, if heaven exists, standing there to practice a… Continue reading
you could find yourself in cold rain on a hot night where raindrops, rain boots, and streetlights combine in the puddles where you take your longest strides — the water shakes, shatters, breaks… Continue reading
She rested her arm on the window ledge, stared out the rain-splattered window at the wet streets below, and wondered aloud how anyone could be persuaded to go out on a day like… Continue reading
Soft-shelled, softer than a turtle’s, it hums in a nest of rags and yarn. You have to humble yourself to hear it. You have to kneel and cup an ear to catch the… Continue reading
You think the shards are all the same: Look again. Glass shards in a room of glass. Orienting north, south. Reflecting bodies darker, lighter. Death can’t erase every difference. Glass shards illuminate our… Continue reading
I put the tiny boat in the water and watch it float away. Somewhere, someday, someone will pull it out of the water, either intact or as a sodden, soggy newspaper mess, find… Continue reading
I have been on a string of so many days hung low. The truth is I am often tired of being alive, of daylight streaming through the translucent glass of my body, my… Continue reading
Where fat doesn’t matter, or bones, bodies ideal and folded into the murk, skins unfamiliar under the sludge patted into wrinkles, over scars and freckles. Take the healing of it, years stripped down… Continue reading
*** Lisa López Smith lives and writes from her home in central Mexico. When she’s not wrangling goats or rescue dogs or kids, you can probably find her riding her bike or painting.… Continue reading
Park Row is an alley. Beneath the day-lit zenith, visibility is ten miles. If my city vanished, I’d see a quarter million acres: bare ocean, alluvial plain. But Park Row is an alley,… Continue reading
Lots of things come and go—the last bowl from our wedding set cracked but did not shatter. The other seven spit shards at the dump, still pyrex white and hopeful where the flowered… Continue reading
My mom cried on the floor because she was afraid of the police shooting me dead. My mom cried on the floor because she was afraid of the police shooting me My mom… Continue reading
What’s Worth Keeping What if it didn’t matter that your parents left to spend two years in Somalia, ripped you from Ferrara to live with estranged grandparents in Kansas? What would remain of… Continue reading
As we noticed in the streets a handbill headed, “Death! one hundred and forty-five lives lost at Cohasset,” we decided to go by way of Cohasset. … Continue reading