|
|
Prelude to Eggs
It would be a nice thing to do to make the eggs. Fry them and then tap drops of hot sauce onto the yolk and laugh because it makes me think of nipple pimples. It would be nice to make nipple pimple eggs and whole-wheat toast and coffee for two. I made my mother scrambled pancakes on her birthday and mother’s day and sometimes the fourth of July. Scrambled because I couldn’t flip. Scrambled as in all over the stove and the floor and the ceiling somehow, as I ignored the mess and plated my creation. “Scrambled
» Continue reading Day by Lucas Mann…
As the girl snored into the boy’s back, the bellies of clouds swelled, then slopped snow onto the region in angry bucketfuls, tearing limbs from trees and heads from telephone poles. In an electric flash and pop, everything went dark.
In the morning the sky’s face was perfect blue, wearing no trace of the black maw that had raged the night before. The streets, however, had collapsed like lungs. Trees, poles, and wires leaned, slumped, or dangled on either side of every thoroughfare. From behind the windshield of his green Taurus, the boy and the girl watched Subarus and
» Continue reading Sunderland, Massachusetts by Mel Bosworth…
I sang about Ruffa, the beautiful girl who fell ill after her boyfriend betrayed her. I saw her weak and dying in her bed, and I saw her mother by her side. I saw her boyfriend who refused to visit her because he’d met another. I saw Ruffa in her bed and I put it into my head that the poor thing would survive, if only I could make it to the last lines of the refrain. I didn’t care about the mountain that jutted out in front of me like a bad tooth, or the steep path I had
» Continue reading Kladnisa Mountain Air by Zdravka Evtimova…
After our second drink, light trickled from the tunnel. There were arrivals. A troupe of girls poured in, their fashions vintage—dresses and hairstyles from the forties. Gift boxes were placed on perimeter tables.
“A theme party,” I said. “Should we leave?”
The bartender shook his head and laughed. “They won’t see you.”
He started making cherry Cokes and Shirley Temples. He was right: we were invisible to teenage girls, we were over thirty. I downed my third Mustang.
Two women stood on chairs and hung a banner: HAPPY SWEET SIXTEEN.
The girls hushed, formed a half-circle
» Continue reading 16 by Gary Moshimer…
Listen to a reading of “Smalling” by Nick Stokes.
The numbers on the alarm clock are too large. You need two hands to hold the coffee mug. You can’t pee over the toilet’s lip while standing. Pee puddles warmly on the linoleum. You can’t pick up your children to kiss them good morning and when you walk them to the bus stop it takes an unforgivable number of steps. As you re-enter your house through the dog door you remember that your children giggled as they swung you between them and after you almost fell there was a strange comfort
» Continue reading Smalling by Nick Stokes…
Staples
Dig it out from under fires. The bread, thin, hard as blades, eaten when and while saturated. Mutton juice. Seepage of marrow. South of Paris, a wild rumor of leavened loaves white as mice. Still, rye becomes the tonic, rising from its station. Bad blood (plenty) scavenged with wheat. New dawn artichoke held high. A mutant thistle. Just wait: potatoes.
Fruit-Vegetable-Nut Meats
Senlis boasts rare cabbages exhaling perfume headier than musk. Soup it. Ferment it. Rub a leaf behind an ear and lean toward unwashed suitors. Melons appear. Currants too, black, black and painful red. Cucumbers, plentiful, and
» Continue reading Medieval Diet by Erin Kautza…
Mae lies next to Howard and watches spores move over his face, into his mouth, and worm under his eyelids. He doesn’t wake, not even when delicate flowerettes bleed from the sheets and up the walls. A light breeze, and shapes vanish, then grow again in stillness, vine across the ceiling and out the door, down the hallway to the boys’ room, where they climb the ladder of their bunk bed in hues of ochre. In daylight, the boys zombie-walk, wild-haired and sleepy, their freckles connected by a lattice of golden mould. Howard’s skin is target practice for ringworm
» Continue reading Not just fungus by Laura M. Gibson…
1 Rowena notes that the garage could be used as a garage and not a storage shed with a remote-controlled door. It does make sense. There are two cars here all the time now. One of them could be frost free all winter long. Next winter. If we still use cars in the future. One cool spring Saturday morning, I stand alone in the gravel driveway, wearing a dust mask and safety glasses; bucket, six-pack, and various cleaning implements in one hand; remote clicker in the other. Press the button, LED flashes. Door squeals up. 2 How did
» Continue reading Some Stuff by Jason Newport…
And so I left on a motorcycle I’d pawned off some perv at the club who’d told me he’d give it to me if I’d beat on some fella inside, which I did, – and I left New York to try again. But, older now, I only had enough juice and fear to make it a third of the way down Route 90 before I crumpled in a shitty motel off the freeway outside of Chicago, and, that night, and for so many after, I knew I’d gotten what I’d I wanted all along. I found an apartment with a
» Continue reading Go! by Peter Jang…
Michelle Pretorius: Dalkey Archive Press focuses on literary, experimental fiction. Could you talk about some of the other things you look for as an editor when you read a new manuscript? Is there a set criteria?
Jeremy M. Davies, Senior Editor of Dalkey Archive Press: No, there’s no set criteria, which makes this question (a frequent one) very difficult to answer, no matter how many times it gets asked! Each of the books we like or publish harbors a fundamental ‘suspicion’ toward the assumptions of narrative, and this suspicion is shared by as many great novelists considered ‘traditional’ as by
» Continue reading An Interview with Jeremy M. Davies by Michelle Pretorius…
|
