Online Exclusives

12.18.12
Third Party
The woman turned to lie on her side in the bed. Her body turned in bed, but she did not turn. She was looking at the ceiling. She looked at the ceiling. It had happened. Her body was on the side of her. [...]
12.11.12
Five Stories
Women like drinks, so they say. We opened our fists and let the money settle on the counter, in front of the woman.  [...]
12.04.12
Three Poems
There is a world in which the old tumult breathes its conclusions. [...]
11.27.12
Three Poems
The divisions are what we will do newly in this world,
Both from heaven torn away, people with trees.  [...]
11.13.12
Three Poems
All stories begin with a doorbell, the enterer,
a light, unexpected yet inevitable. Implied

accusation a question of how soon, when the dead [...]
11.06.12
Guide to a Childhood Diversion
This is a game for two sisters. The sisters must be close in age, perhaps six and eight. They will need the sash of a terrycloth robe. There must be a kitchen island or some other domestic island. [...]
10.30.12
Shadow Boxes
Day’s           whole transparency

a relief                the fine turning

moon’s tug   through the morning [...]
10.23.12
An Introduction to James Gatrell’s Journals and Letters
That evening, Gatrell was said to be as “as aloof as usual.” One faculty member described him as “the personification of sadness walking.”  [...]
10.16.12
Four Poems
Discus hit in the golden field.
The tent endures downpours of wine. [...]
10.09.12
Three Poems
Some peaches were gathered in your name,
    and that was enough underneath panels of
trick moonlight, parsing out phrases from [...]
09.25.12
Four Poems
Chocolate wrapped in its foil
Cadences of tinkers in the street. [...]
09.11.12
Four Poems
A coo is forming a dove from the open breast of zero: a sound, a rivulet, a note to wed no toward. Something along the lines of the question “glass?” [...]
08.28.12
Three Poems
A signal of danger has arrived in consciousness.
It is a metaphysically pointed arrangement. [...]
08.14.12
Five Poems
The curtain you noticed trembling, the whole 

soft front of it 
in purls, tasseled with rope and yearning  [...]
08.07.12
House of Halls
In the house of halls, there are no rooms, only corridors: a gilded corridor, a humid corridor, a corridor of ice, a corridor to a corridor [...]
08.01.12
Three Poems
If among the waxwing’s flight, I describe unbroken light, I describe water among the sleep of birds. [...]
07.17.12
Three Poems
 The face of the sum of each 
                 day really 
         is covered with bulbs [...]
07.10.12
From Drafts for Shelley
A figure in black at the beginning there is this one
Figure in outline a boat [...]
07.03.12
this flying forwards backward, this missnessing, it has to do more with everything—
Augusto de Campos and Emily Dickinson translation experiments by Eric Ellingsen and others
Ding says an amethyst missness
Says the way it works is the way I meant it to work.
Missness: The way it missnesses is the way I mean it to miss.
Ding says the missness is all I have. [...]
06.26.12
Chupeta
He drove carelessly and the sun passing through the window looked to melt his hair to his head. [...]
06.12.12
From Having and Space
Only so many times you can rotate, opt out of whippoorwill. [...]
06.05.12
From Reveler
It is true my face beheld
The crestfallen captcha
That reads the end of the world [...]
05.29.12
Three Poems
Who among us is alive

a temporary ailment

between nil and naught [...]
05.15.12
Three Poems
Can isolation make a person go blind. Go animal. [...]
05.08.12
Rabbit Starvation
Bunny was young. He had never even eaten this kind of cracker before. He snapped it to bits with his strong front teeth, grinning at his noisy cereal violence [...]
04.17.12
The Raincoat
What sort of person was Peter Underwood? Was he a confused person? A desperate person? Did he give any thought to history, to politics, to the difficult problem of communication? [...]
04.10.12
Four Poems
scent that never leaves 
flesh 
is flesh [...]
04.03.12
I, Inc.
lost (men’s faces aflash
in archives), expressionist
petroglyphs eerily
contemporary [...]
03.27.12
On Lust
I look in the morning

                            having an upward aspect or direction, lamb: honorable, prideful, seeing with attention—

                            the name of Thy city—electric shell, nucleus of general movement; 
                            crocus of crouching [...]
03.13.12
Six Gymnopédies
We don’t live on the rise of an ancient volcano. [...]
03.06.12
An Ailment That I Will Not Treat
the aurum eye morning decreases [...]
02.28.12
Five Poems
Renounce the vestibule of non-vital vitals.
Confess the gallbladder,
the glandular wallflowers,
the objectionable oblong spleen. [...]
02.21.12
Years
There were bicycles in the garage. Children in the bedrooms. Tall, messy, attractive children who put on confused looks at the sight of her, no matter how often they saw her. 

Because she wasn’t theirs.

And they weren’t hers. [...]
02.07.12
Disfigurement
They lit fires in trash cans and stared at me as I walked past them. [...]
01.31.12
Four Poems
He drops off the kids, puffs out his little adopted cloud 
into Nevada. Some of it stays inside him [...]
01.24.12
Sport
Couldn’t have been as odd for anyone as it was for us, when Finland’s blood factories were shuttered. [...]
01.17.12
Six Poems
clock threads indeterminate language wash the clothes balance the socks
the reindeer is tied to a lamppost  [...]
01.10.12
Two Poems
If the turn is silly bussed, then what to make of it. Does it assemble lip-smacking good will for the contested subject. [...]
01.03.12
Ten Poems
This is a habitat of briar 
a flexuous source [...]

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In Print

Vol. 82
Works & Days
Spring 2024
Bradford Morrow

Online

October 2, 2024
It is not a beautiful day in Mexico City unless you can see Popocatépetl. In this place, beauty is determined solely by whether or not the volcano breaches the nebulous smog like a visitation, by whether the eye can ascend its snow-covered face. When what was sensed but veiled yesterday is suddenly revealed today, it is, in the smallest way, a faith realized.
 
September 25, 2024
My eyes were already fixed on the face
Of My Lady, and my mind with them—
All other thoughts had been wiped away.

She wasn’t smiling; instead, she began:
“If I were smiling, you’d become
Like Semele when she was turned to ashes,
September 18, 2024
We were picnicking on the plains
when she emerged from the rushes.
She wore an apricot smock.
Her face was smeared with soot.
She said her name was Stina Groth.
A cloud of bats burst from the chimney
of a crumbling cottage behind her.
We asked her where home was.
She drew a circle in the silt with a twig.
The internationally renowned writer will read from her work.
Monday, October 21, 2024
4:00 pm – 5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Chapel of the Holy Innocents