Online Exclusives

12.20.16
Two Poems
Day calls or what passes for day here. I leave you
sleeping in this light that comes later each morning,
as if we were approaching winter, not the moon
we aim for [...]
12.13.16
Two Poems
Nothing like a view of the sea to remind you
there are multiple happinesses in any moment [...]
12.06.16
The Man Who Wore Death
There once was a man who wore high khaki pants and button-up shirts with the faintest blue stripes. [...]
11.29.16
How We Got into This
My house was the color of silence and dust. Bright things tried to come out in it but they were usually absorbed back into the carpet. [...]
09.27.16
Five Poems
One decoy waits
to be retrieved. One
craves the bite of
something bigger. [...]
09.13.16
You Should Have the Body
Two things: You can’t see it coming when you don’t know whether you’re coming or going. You have to see some things many times before you see it, and sometimes not even then. [...]
08.30.16
The Atheist in the Attic
“There they were, one headless, one with his hands hacked off, hanging like two mutton carcasses from a gibbet on the raised octagon of stones in front of the jail.” [...]
08.09.16
Seven Poems
Looks like sugar.
Let it enter. [...]
07.26.16
Too Much for Adele
All the letters she sends to Le Moucheron aren’t sent back, but neither are they answered. [...]
07.19.16
Two Stories
We, being Found People, know lostness when we see it. We feel it like a vibe running through the antennae of our bones. [...]
07.06.16
Everyone and Her Resemblances
She took charge of my imaginary presence

Which of the women is she?

She is the one who refuses to say [...]
06.28.16
Among
But Max didn’t sail back through a day and a night. He didn’t return across a tumbling sea. His dinner wasn’t still warm. None of that is true. [...]
06.14.16
Two Poems
What’s worse: uniformed children 
or betraying friends by writing 
about them? Bingo [...]
06.07.16
From Feral Girl
as damage crawls along floors
or breathes through baseboards [...]
05.31.16
Correspondence Messenger
To light, waiting for morning, between two things—her silent face, this rock, the ordinary meaning of sound. Blood, stone. [...]
05.24.16
To Waken as Field
unbaptized, undocumented
            stars watch us more intently in
                                   bright daylight when we cease
      to believe in them [...]
05.03.16
An Interview
My inability to recognize faces makes the desire to form a consistent image of a person quite connected to my intent focus on perceiving and memorizing the rhythm of someone’s speech, the intonations within their questions, the length of their sentences. I will recognize them later by their language. [...]
04.12.16
Seven Pieces
She painted clouds, he hunted amber. She counted eggs, he angled rainward. [...]
04.05.16
Four Marriages
We descend. We pass through the roof, inside the house, onto the scuffed hardwood floor, down a long dim hall, where we search out our subjects. [...]
03.29.16
Four Poems
The easiest job in America wouldn’t be easy enough for me. [...]
03.22.16
The Old Country
From the time I was ten, I knew I might have to incinerate my father. [...]
03.15.16
From Sexual Stealing
Beaujeu of horrors
scenes only human
deep bottom of base
trembling in grandeur [...]
03.08.16
Two Poems
To collapse means to crumble but also to compress
remnants into the remembrance of a whole
body, this person was. [...]
03.01.16
Two Poems
Blue eagle has learned
to look past
emerging green light
and the north wind’s rancor. [...]
02.23.16
Four Poems
I was blind as a stone
Blunt as a stone
I lay there—
     useful 
     as a nub of a thumb [...]
02.09.16
Two Poems
Through the palace where mirrors

                      Refract through water
                                                  What desire I know                      other than another’s

                                                                                           More conducting than my own

Through the Hall of Perfect Brightness. [...]
02.02.16
Love Song
Let’s go then, you and me … 3 … 
—this gauze collecting blood, the midday heat 
still in the concrete, a tetchy spider stop-
motioning its way along a table [...]
01.26.16
Three Poems
I have no subscription. I am not 
privy to facts. Libraries exist but for the perfumery, 
the water stain on each page, 
blurblack corsages.  [...]
01.19.16
The Beard of Human Weakness
Mr. Hamilton likes to close deals at Taco Brothers over peach-a-ritas, and he gets a deal on the peach-a-ritas because he hooked up the franchisee of this Taco Brothers with the empty lot next door for extra parking. When I call him, he’s pumped as hell.  [...]

Connect

e-mail
Submissions

In Print

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

Online

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.
With photographs by the author
May 10, 2023
I’ve been snorkeling in this river for sixteen years now and documenting a small stretch of it for about thirteen. Once a week, year ‘round, regardless of the weather, I will swim for several hours, picking up trash as I go, but mostly photographing what I find—fish and turtles, plants and rocks, even the contours of the riverbed, which change depending on the flow. Based on John Burroughs’ maxim—“To learn something new, take the path that you took yesterday”—I decided a long time ago to focus on the half-mile reach that runs from City Park, through Sewell Park, and on to the spillway below Spring Lake.