Online Exclusives

We had just come out of the woods that morning, a gardener’s boy and I, where we had been cutting down young ash trees. To be made into graceful little stilts under a dovecote for the municipal park. This was my first real job, newly begun, the first blueprint of mine that would become reality. [...]

Bertrand Russell finds himself in purgatory, tumbling through literal representations of the worlds of ideas he examined in his classic text, A History of Western Philosophy, gulping much-needed air, for example, from Empedocles’ bucket. [...]

It’s June, and somehow the time of year seems important, though I think of it only this once. I’m out posting a check, and there is a reflection of me in the window—the big one across the street into the coffee shop. I stare at the reflection. You are there too, on the other side with a coffee cup in hand, though I don’t know it. [...]

She stood outside the lecture hall examining the poster. The image was murky, perhaps a tattooed human face, perhaps a tribal mask. [...]

Oliver’s father, before he left, said the old books were scrawled in ink on birch from Kashmir long ago, crumpled to dust. [...]

On December 1, 1946, Paula Jean Welden put on a bright-red parka, left her dorm for a hike on the Long Trail, and vanished into the thin mountain air of the trailhead. [...]

I have a follower, a man with eloquent eyebrows, miniature in stature. [...]

The knowledge we gathered is no longer useful.

The system you understand shifts and makes no sense.

And this is the body you spent years getting used to.

Tomorrow, the light will not recognize it.

Light has no language for it. [...]

The boy born under the sign of the swan
has walked due north along a line of spoonwood. [...]

Wrapped in the good bleach, the house becomes both border and brine. [...]

To the ends of the earth we go
without ever leaving the mall. [...]

A tiny matryoshka doll glides out of her house and onto a broad palm-tree-lined boulevard that stretches along the edge of a white chalk cliff. [...]

Who speaks
                    the word
                    that you hear? [...]

To the woodland-dwelling currier who fizzes my blood, I leave the myth of Daphne, that he might notice the trees’ paralytic lurching. [...]

On the walls of the little house where I grew up hung three images. [...]

The boy scouts lined up on the freezing banks
about to recite their summerland cheer. [...]

When a library is emptied, the books are dispersed so that the gathering stands as simply a stage in their being. [...]

Both sexes in the same body. It’s a dream. [...]

Above the pine trees leaning into the wet black bank, a zip moved up and down in the sky, as the treeline moved up and down, controlled by two eyes looking up and looking down through the window. [...]

This time last year, I called my doctor to tell her I was dying. [...]

I am from a big book with five books in it. [...]

As Harvey stepped closer to the scene, he saw now that the fishermen’s raincoats were uniformly orange—and not yellow—and, as they surrounded the fallen beast like so many scattered searchlights, the smell of it, this close, shifted to something so deeply marine it smelled dark—mineshaft dark; the rotting corpses of countless failed canaries, the ones who got lost in the pitch; and something of burning tires. [...]

Signifying garlands               this zealous isle 

with love’s convention          overspread:


let the satellites wander        primordial [...]

Designed Fiorenzo Bencivenga in 1914, Il Maniero della Terribile Notte is an Italian board game of which only fifty copies were ever produced. [...]

Exhibit A in my campaign to save the heath—for now having it declared a Site of Special Scientific Interest—is a slim hardback stolen from a local dealer in rare and unusual books. [...]

Before it begins, we take
everything that moves. Leave

remains for the dogs [...]

They walked around in the foreign city looking for someplace to have dinner [...]

What will you do with these pearls he has given you?
Can you eat them? Can you grind them into honey
and return them to the water, sweeter than they were? [...]

You have been offered a position at the office that violates your principles. [...]

Day was waning, wind rippled the muddy puddles. For a long time, they stood shivering on the platform; then they filed past an officer who told each one where to go. [...]

While much current research has centered on the challenges faced international students, business people, and military personnel traveling abroad, relatively little has been written about the plight of involuntary sojourners, more commonly known as “in-between people,” after the name given Takahashi in his (1996) landmark study of the subject. [...]

Thank you for the wine, but I am not here to socialize, Circe. I am here looking for my men. [...]

Not a little chilling that you come calling, Mr. Tohwey, tonight, the anniversary of Edgar Allan Poe’s untimely and suspicious death. [...]

Divided as half of me is small and distant.
The other tongue talks of exterior objects,
while this one speaks of water and limitation. [...]

flowers that belong to the dead, flowers that unclothe their bodies
                                      without reserve [...]

Gray metal box in the sideyard rumbled low into the warm soft around it. [...]

Think of kings. If they cannot impose themselves upon commoners, or just a few folk with almost comparable titles, they sink into an ooze of moldy celery and black bones, where, my dears, they do not belong. [...]

The long hallway where the old and the infirm waited for the apostolic group, Leopoldo thinks, the long hallway like a passageway inside cloisters or convents where the old and the infirm waited for the apostolic group every Saturday from 3:00 to 6:00. [...]

The Andromeda galaxy ranks among the brightest Messier objects. [...]

The father goes to the daycare to recover his child. Time ceases to move when he enters the room, which has assumed a preposterous shape and size. [...]