Online Exclusives

12.24.13
P R A C T I C E
If you spend a quiet fortress in tears it may be necessary to spurn stillness. [...]
12.10.13
Two Poems
Elephant chest deep in the green-
Gray swamp; sinking elephant

Escaping the charms of light. [...]
12.03.13
Arguments from a Winter’s Walk
by Thomas Bernhard
translated by Adam Siegel
It was a terrible fear of others, you should know, that kept me from killing myself [...]
11.25.13
Rancho Brava
Under cover of this letter please find initial, selected results from GCD’s first Focus Group in Zone 5 (Southwest) for Product 1822J: Authentic Garden-fresh Salsa.  [...]
11.12.13
Cloud in Trousers
Your thought, 
dreaming on a softened brain
like a blown-up lackey on a greasy couch,  [...]
10.29.13
Glaciation
And yet on a northern railway line terminating at a certain coastal fishing village where a yearly festival is held in honor of the sea’s glaciation, unexplained derailments had suddenly increased, leading to pronounced injury and, in at least one case, death. [...]
10.22.13
Fugue State
This morning I woke up and it was drizzling hard little needles onto the gray mud of our wasted fields and I thought that today I might finally do it. [...]
10.15.13
Stranded at Alpha
A man does alpha
exercises on his wolves

Tall as deer 
glacial eyes [...]
10.08.13
Three Stories
It took Ruth a long time to begin seeing Julian. At first he didn’t have the shape of a man, but of the piles of furniture and clothes she’d see heaped beside the road. [...]
09.30.13
The Orange Tree
by Dong Li
In a yellowed family photo there is an orange tree, leaves burned.

The oranges are green, but we are already starting to look alike in the photo. [...]
09.24.13
From Mandelstam Variations
meanwhile across the mimetic subdivide
lights go green &
                             a republic faintly
discorporates
                       vox organum [...]
09.17.13
A Genealogy of Instinct
There were few realms in which he was a novice, that Saro, let alone the sphere of self-fashioning. Exceedingly fleshy yet with terrific agility, this first cousin of my mother flaunted the same billowy paunch that would come to be called, by its own bearer, The Tomb of, Not (as he always made clear) the Ubiquitous Anchovy, but of the Eternal Engraulis Encrasicolus. [...]
09.10.13
Three Poems
My path is determined by invisible gold coins that rattle at the bottom of a moneybag until their volume becomes a ruby. [...]
09.03.13
Interval
And so found myself to be the not-iris planted in the Mary Garden as in picture her eyes (forget-me-nots) her hair (maidenhair fern) her fingers fluttering as she speaks with her hands (potentilla). [...]
08.27.13
Minstrel Passage
Under cover of darkness, and not unlike a pirate heself, Mr. Stollmeyer eventually dared climb the Rosalind’s mainmast. [...]
08.13.13
From Letters to Mao
Dear Mao, I want to describe for you the feeling of sleep, as described neuropsychologist Giulio Tononi, who uses words like oscillations and waves, while his patient is noted to gather the phrase the sea moving a boat. [...]
07.30.13
Excerpts from the Glossary for A Practical History of Dr. Horatio Bergen’s Experiments in Time Travel
Absence of Time: For the purposes of this volume, references to an absence of time primarily address a subject’s lack of an internal perception module which humans experience the passage of time. [...]
07.09.13
Three Poems
These are the days everyone talks about: pixilated skies, 
newness reinventing itself like an aura, each of us 
driving away. In Coeur d’Alene (Heart of an Awl) you fall in love [...]
06.18.13
Without a Body
(in which—sea monsters—and Ava’s wedding ring is returned to Jacob by a female police officer) [...]
06.04.13
From Sea of Hooks
A strikingly lovely young woman was sitting alone at a table in Christopher’s section. [...]
05.21.13
Two Poems
The cat who wore too many pajamas took a walk around the block, said
I’d rather be in bed but the walk around the block takes me there. [...]
04.23.13
Correspondence sans Violin
dear a.,

            have you found them

huddled in ash

their fat leaves like parasols [...]
04.09.13
Cathedra
                        Murmur  sift  incomplete and sudden—
                    Spring on   bowed  feet
                                                           and  lend no purchase to the flagstone floors [...]
03.26.13
Architectural Absence
Aedicule: A small shrine nominated, to the Académie Québécoise, in the category of official sacramental profanity. [...]
03.12.13
What Is and What Could Be: Hank Mobley
When my coworker Robert heard that I was getting into jazz, he brought a CD into work for me. [...]
03.05.13
Two Onesheets
Br’er was a trouble word in early 1980s North Carolina. [...]
02.26.13
Curriculum
The map was printed on a handkerchief. [...]
02.19.13
Four Phantom Limbs
It drags an unlined palm forward, clutching
a way over ground by paper-smooth fingers.  [...]
02.12.13
Four Sonnets
With papers, crayons, ink, colors, with
Signs then words, with rules to assemble
Them, with persistence and the aid [...]
02.05.13
The Windows
This is my entreaty and my first word. The old
lacking in any charm, cars in the carport,
—such feverish violins—beyond established archives, 
a silken paradise, overstuffed panorama. [...]
01.29.13
Three Poems
Stray frays of virga. In the wood grain: line graph of annual rainfall. [...]
01.22.13
From Maps for Jackie
days of rain project
ennui in morning [...]
01.15.13
Three Stories
She wears his socks and they pack the dogs and leashes, getting in his Jeep, the dogs in back with their heads out the window. [...]
01.08.13
A Report on Certain Curious Objects, Believed to Be Words in an Unknown Language of the Dead
The headmistress of the Vocational School for Ghost Speakers & Hearing Mouth Children, in addition to turning out youthful amanuenses for the dead, developed a theory of what she called the necrocosmos. [...]

Connect

e-mail
Submissions

In Print

Vol. 83
Revenants, The Ghost Issue
Fall 2024
Coedited by Joyce Carol Oates and Bradford Morrow

Online

December 4, 2024
I was educated in an old Sisters of Mercy convent school, where rumors of ghost nuns were ten a penny and were never especially convincing. However, when I was fourteen, I was in a math class and the teacher walked past me to the back of the room—I heard the movement of her long skirts and felt the displacement of air. A moment later, I put up my hand and looked behind me for help, but the teacher was still sitting ahead of me at her desk in front of the class.
November 27, 2024
Rae Armantrout   EXPRESSION   Give me your spurt   of verbs, [...]
November 20, 2024
As a big surprise for her birthday, I gave in and bought the dog she’d been wanting for a long time. A frisky little caramel-colored dachshund she immediately named Fredo after the weak Corleone brother in The Godfather, her favorite movie. I thought it an odd name but it was her choice and her dog.