His life from without may seem but a rude mound of mud; there will be some golden chamber at the heart of it, in which he dwells delighted.
POEM OF THE WEEK
Pig Shit Cannon
By Jon D. Lee
We witnessed our town not as the whole we’d thought but a series of fault lines just below the polish and held in place by the loosest of binds.
WINNERS AND FINALISTS
Congratulations. . .
to Kartikeya Shekhar, Peter Bradbury, and Doug Ramspeck, the top three winners, and to all the contest finalists.
See the full list here.
SPRING STORY CONTEST
We’re looking for short stories, essays, memoirs, photo essays, graphic stories, and excerpts from long fiction and nonfiction.
Please see the Guidelines.
FROM THE LIBRARY
English
By Yusef Komunyakaa
When I was a boy, he says, the sky began burning, & someone ran knocking on our door one night. I heard a girl talking, but they weren’t words.
FICTION
NONFICTION
FICTION
The Rooms
By Susan Minot
What she wanted, she found herself saying before the sob choked her, was to be able to live—not just with another person, but with herself.
NONFICTION
The Measure of All Things?
By Hal Crowther
There are mornings, not few enough, when I feel like burning my birth certificate and resigning from the human race.
POETRY
POETRY
POETRY
POETRY
Fire Emblem
By JP Allen
Autumn to autumn, I hold your face in cardboard under my bed till I place it on my paper altar for the Day of the Dead. Well.
Most years I forget.
POETRY
Rasam and Beans Curry
By Supritha Rajan
When I raise a spoon of beans roasted with coconut to my mouth, what I see condenses to a series of images.
POETRY
The Reader in Quarantine
By Sharon Olds
The reader was no longer fifty, or sixty. She did not really think of herself as an old woman, though she called herself one.
POETRY
POETRY
CARTOONS
POETRY
The Loneliness of Fireworks
By Zhai Yongming
Fireworks and bar girls all dance in revelry before they subside, in the end, into loneliness. Anyone can go wild in this moonlight.
POETRY
Home Is a Verb of Motion
By Grace H. Zhou
On a bald knoll, circled by on-ramps and overpasses, weathering and weighted is a concrete behemoth for the gods of want.
CARTOONS
Cartoon Art Volume 2024-04
By Various Artists
New laughs with a modest matador, some fashionable wishes, a new approach to exercise, the fruits of hard labor, and more.