Word of the Day
It has been a week of nouns weakening in applicability, often adjunct and defunct; this acronym owes more, to us, than onus. Mill mountain, noun, is promised to purge even itself, last sold in 1633, last whispered in Winchester, the fluxing flax chalked off. Info-bot is both proper and not, noun; Nunlets puff out grey, […]
Summer Postmodern
The boy has black hair that’s clipped to be unkempt. From a mall bench, he eyes two girls, who wander past in the distraction of gossip and pre-ripped jeans. He wonders which he would prefer. But he stops himself, in curt distaste, when he sees them enter a store he would not go to himself. […]
Gibraltar
We expect the days like this, but they come only when they like, and carrying their monstrous young inside them, waiting. There were dust motes, but Philip didn’t see them. Nor could he remember faces, just then, nor forms. There simply was the sea. And Africa! he reminded Alice, pointing to the coast, inanely, which […]
Conversation
It’s like a death, but it’s worse. Because this is the last time I’ll speak with you and we’re both angry. I’m yelling something, but I’m looking at the rumple between your mouth and your nose, watching it as you press together your lips. The words continue, but my voice has long since drowned away. […]
A Yacht Club Party is Winding Down
The last few bars of a big-band tune exposing themselves without a hint of self-awareness and the half-sober apercus of a gaggle of twenty or so be-sequined, be-suited women and men of a certain age their laughter playing soft on the southwest wind that is wrinkling the bay— everyone saying at once ‘I’ve drunk too […]
Simile
I have written poems pomes (pennyeach) like pommes as in pommes de terre those roots with eyes— and now I write in my eyes, to my eyes à mes yeux which means in another light ‘by my way of thinking’— and so to think of you as something like the apple fruit of one or […]
Her Torso or Addie
Like a length of string, like a lily of a day a firm, fragile thing. A spring stuck in play; or, the spring that can begin halfway to halfway The fixed compass pin where every line and degree meet their origin. Something new to see: when leaves fall and branches spread, the trunk to the […]
Amphorae Transported
a Palestinian transports wine amphorae West. state government export programs should be. implemented as opposed to the arguments. about policy intervention strategies. an eager Roman transports wine amphorae East. execute the social change, “I am invulnerable. like a trade’markâ€, says a Palestinian, the role. of legal rules is to asses without clear goals. intervention strategies […]
Rosemary’s Texas Taco
Denver was becoming acutely aware that at this moment in the road trip, where a second wind might have kicked in, not even the slightest of breezes was blowing. “I know! Lets not go, let’s go somewhere else, we can drive to Tennessee or California, or Texas!†“We have to go. Nick’s expecting us, and […]
Ghazal
It could be anyone, the one waiting somewhere for you to love her. You wait in a dark station, the trains arriving and leaving, knowing nothing of her. Everything is a welling up, an unhurried dance spinning and dipping, like the verses of a song repeating – singing like a hungry dove to her. She […]
A Translation by Elizabeth Abernethy
JESUS Either someone plays Mahomet or I quit! MOSES But you’re not taking into account the risks that that imports. If you make an actor incarnate Mahomet you’ll have fifteen thousand fatwahs on your back. JESUS When I do theatre, I expose myself to criticism, not fatwahs. And besides, what’s a fatwah? AUTHOR In this […]
Lightning Can Mean Everything
There is a stop light in front of Weston Autobody; in evening the autoshop light sears mechanics. Some stand – columns – and hold cars with outstretched fingers. One hangs like a bodied hammock another is a bowed branch. The light colors them into not-yet-shed virgins, discovered about to uncover something known. It is inappropriate […]
The End of the Hanging Basket
“Mr. Stone was commissioned by the mayor of London to design a “dry garden†of plants and flowers that use less water because England, widely associated with drizzle, is actually drying up.†“LONDON IS SO DRY,†Wall Street Journal, July 2006 I Like a noon time drunkard one day they drank too much. Even the […]
Letter from the Editors
It would seem the mad dash to fill the Nass’s literary issue might best warrant a clandestine mafia negotiation; by this logic, the editors (in fedoras and spats, sure, and affecting a Sicilian shtick) would send out coercive e-mails to campus literary types, who would know better than to refuse the offer. But the reality […]
Hot Fuzz…
Until it goes batshit crazy, Edgar Wright’s Hot Fuzz is a slightly underwhelming, if occasionally hilarious, film. [Cormac: The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night.] The fellows that […]
Carrying the Fire
Every now and then there comes a book which is like an arrow shot into the heart of things because it has the power to redeem the fading, diffuse enterprise of bookselling and novel-gazing both, all the misbegotten hours spent in trains and libraries and the whole history of a form lately devolved into the […]
Narcissus
Jakob’s eyes were a prison for my soul. They were tragically beautiful. They were beautifully tragic. There was sadness there, and a wise weariness of the world, and yet somehow a glint of hope. His eyes nearly broke my heart. A sapphire ocean, sweeping me away in a shimmering riptide of tears and fluttering lashes.
Hang Up
And imagine my heel a hook around your ear – my other against your chest, the rest of my leg singing. Stay there, crush ripping hair from the bud, the best part thrash: from the shove. or the bouncy ball – this is the sliver, you are the nail. Muck mud. There is no hammer […]
Ovaries look like oysters, but they taste like halibut
That’s what I used to tell my interns, anyway. It was such a hoot to watch the queasy dubious looks on their faces as they glanced sideways at each other, speechless. They’d grin at each other, sometimes giggle; other times they just looked sick, or nervous, like I’d taken a piss on the preacher Sunday morning at church—Is he serious?
