Unearthing these Roots to Everywhere and Nowhere
When I visited my great-grandparents in Florida as a child, I often shook the trunk of the old orange tree in their front yard. At the time, I did not know of the tangle of roots that stretched for...
View ArticleAmazonia
The address was somewhere near Newtown Creek, in the borderlands between Queens and Brooklyn but also between rebirth and decay: abandoned warehouses, chop shops, and fuel tanks slowly giving way to...
View ArticleGenoa: A Telling of Wonders Review by Eric Meckley
Paul Metcalf. Genoa: A Telling of Wonders. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2015. PP. 264 Reviewed by Eric Meckley We humans have a strange attraction to round numbers, and a penchant for marking the...
View ArticleInterview: Poet Ben Goldberg
CQ: Facets of the mythic appear in several of your poems (“Daedalus Builds a Treehouse” and “This City Hands Me Myths; I Hand Them Back”), not only evoking and playing with Joseph Campell’s...
View ArticleJellyfish Moon
Sadie knew that most girls her age would be happy to spend an entire week at the seaside, but most girls did not have Sadie’s mother. Most girls also did not have Sadie’s mother’s boyfriend, who drove...
View ArticleThe Crow
The crow sat in the back yard like a stray piece of tire on the side of an expressway, except blacker and shinier. As my daughter and I watched, it shook itself out of a resting huddle, picking up a...
View ArticleInterview with Kyle Ellingson by Kenneth Lota of CQ
Kyle Ellingson lives in Saint Paul, MN, where he works for Garrison Keillor’s Common Good Books. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Sou’wester, Bluestem Online, Euphony, and...
View ArticleChez Magnifique
Tucked down an alley in the once-stately Old Capital neighborhood, a small café, Chez Magnifique, had been operating business-as-usual right through the Great Drought. It never shut down, never seemed...
View ArticleReview of The Opposite of People by Patrick Ryan Frank
reviewed by Adam Palumbo The latter half of the twentieth century saw television and film arise as the dominant media vehicles in American culture, and Patrick Ryan Frank’s poetry collection The...
View ArticleGarbage Can
A bunch of noisy goddamn ducks were flying over the hospital as the orderly wheeled Glynda’s wheelchair out to the taxi. Geese, probably they were geese. Whatever. The orderly was a studly black guy...
View ArticleWe Are Beautiful, We Are Wild
We have names for everything, and they are usually in Denglish, the language we speak with each other. The bedrooms in the Wohngemeinschaften, the student housing apartments, open to balconies. Each...
View ArticleReview of “Hurry Please I Want to Know” by Paul Griner
New York City: Sarabande Books, 2015. Reviewed by Doreen Thierauf Hurry Please I Want to Know is Paul Griner’s second short story collection, following the release of his third novel, Second Life, in...
View ArticleEdith’s Goats
There was to be a wedding at the old Bethel Church, which seemed peculiar. As far as Edith knew, nothing happened there these days except club meetings or funerals for families with plots in the...
View ArticleWelcome to Mexico
By Sarah Earle Záhořík I don’t have an appetite for the lamb shanks, too humid, but the vinho verde is delicious. I put down my fork. Joel pours me another glass; he’s procured the whole bottle, “for...
View ArticleEdith’s Goats
by JERRY WHITUS There was to be a wedding at the old Bethel Church, which seemed peculiar. As far as Edith knew, nothing happened there these days except club meetings or funerals for families with...
View ArticleWelcome to Mexico
By Sarah Earle Záhořík I don’t have an appetite for the lamb shanks, too humid, but the vinho verde is delicious. I put down my fork. Joel pours me another glass; he’s procured the whole bottle, “for...
View ArticlePaint Her
by AMY SAVAGE When I went in for my hysterectomy, I flirted with the nurses. Though I appreciate the female form, I was not aroused by their competence and clogs. They were required to serve me and I...
View ArticleA Conversation with Matt Izzi
Matt Izzi lives in East Boston. His stories have been published in Post Road Magazine, Shenandoah, and elsewhere. A short play of his appears in the current issue of Third Coast. He is originally...
View ArticleA Conversation with Ryan Habermeyer
Ryan Habermeyer earned his MFA from the University of Massachusetts and is currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Missouri. His fiction has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and has...
View ArticleRot-Eye
by SHELLY WEATHERS I was sent down the street with a bottle of mentholated liniment to give to Mrs. Jesop for her spider-bitten leg. “Mrs. Jesop?” I whispered or mouthed through the screen door from...
View Article