Online Exclusives

12.19.03
From A Story
The man is in the backyard, quoting to the stars a secret
only his heart knows, smiling at the moon first, and then  [...]
11.10.03
The Museum of Small Things
I’m telling you this because you don’t remember. [...]
10.18.03
From The Rooms Where We Are
The room where I’m
kept is all        glass. [...]
09.18.03
From Everything and More
Here is a quotation from G. K. Chesterton: “Poets do not go mad; but chess players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. [...]
09.01.03
The Last Hand
Before me lies a man. Perhaps handsome once, time has flattened his features, eroded the tightness of character—a creased brow, a drooped nose. [...]
08.20.03
The Sangreal
These things without nature, proper nature that is, of a terrestrial kind. Devoid of the essential forepart. But with wings. [...]
08.09.03
Three Poems from The Black Heralds
by César Vallejo
translated by Rebecca Seiferle
    There’s the desire to return, to love, to not be absent,
and the desire to die, fought by two
opposing waters that are never to be an isthmus. [...]
08.04.03
From Pirate Talk, or, Mermalade
Ma, there’s rope in my soup.
      Eat it or you can’t watch the hanging. [...]
06.09.03
January
In January, during the deepest part of winter, after two years of pleading on my part not to mention numerous gifts and blandishments and increasingly lucrative proposals, she once again agreed to be photographed. [...]
05.10.03
From The Lichtenberg Figures
When a longing exceeds its object, a suburb is founded.
Goatsuckers spar in the linden. The redskins are hunted. [...]
03.22.03
The Prince of Bees
There was nothing left for me after that but the beach—the grey afternoon—bells of cable cars over the lyme grass and a field of desiccated husks sprawling along the dunes. I was nineteen—or—twenty—as I have said, again and again—and will continue to say—fully-clothed and shivering over the sand in delicate measured steps. [...]
02.12.03
The Judge’s Wife
There’s a tower the lake calls Brother.
She whispers, someone has lost a white dress
in my eye that swims like nightfish.
[...]
01.25.03
Three Poems
In prehistoric times there was balance.
Bedrooms were charming and restful
animals would travel for miles
to be blinded by the beauty of the dawn. [...]

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In Print

Vol. 80
Ways of Water
Spring 2023
Edited by Bradford Morrow

Online

May 31, 2023
Ice worms first start communing with me in Forlandsundet, a miles-deep sound north of the Greenland Sea. I don’t speak Norwegian, but I can parse: For. Land. Sun. It’s completely black outside. Det means “that or it.” Det, that’s easy, I’ve been one all my life.

The KV Svalbard is an icebreaker. From the foredeck, the rocky screes sweeping west are the planet’s emptiest place. No one between us and the North Pole.

Det,” I hear, “Oi Det.” I can’t locate the strange, oblong voice, more of a nose whistle. Near me? but not inside me. I soon give up.
May 24, 2023
Of course the book she writes—the lesser book, the book about nothing—becomes a popular text, one that readers adore. When they ask her what she will write next, she says she is going to write the book over. Over? they ask her.
       Again, she says. She isn’t really a writer, she tells them, she’s a transcriber. She transcribes stories.
       Across languages? they ask.
       No, she says. That would be translation. I used to do that but stopped, she says. Now I transcribe. I take texts and transcribe them into another version of the same language.
       So you rewrite, they say.
       No, she says. You’ll see.
May 18, 2023
For thousands of years, the peoples of the Marshall Islands have entertained a bustling interisland travel by canoe and small sailing craft without any of the tools—compass, sextant, nautical charts, and, these days, GPS—on which the rest of the world has depended. Within a purely oral tradition, Marshallese navigators developed a highly refined system of voyaging, relying entirely on their senses to decipher the subtlest of codes in the aqueous environment. Theirs has always been a world of waves.