You have not yet recovered from jet lag when your neighbors in teachers’ housing throw you a welcome party. You and two other Americans just arrived to teach English here. After drinking, one of your neighbors presents each
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Marilyn Abildskov ~ Bodies in Transit
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Wilson Koewing ~ Six Shorts
Gray
There is no gray, at least that I’ve witnessed, more depressing than the sky on those short winter days in the south where the sun never fully comes out. In Ireland, in the summer, it can be a terrible gray for days, but
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Julian George ~ Three Poems
Ashes to Ashes
For AJY
I want you.
I want you
In your hippie vibe
In your marijuana haze
In your tie-dye flat
Shimmying like my sister Kate
(I wish I could shimmy like my sister Kate)
Before
Begging -
Sean Ennis ~ A Feature or a Bug
Grace directed me at dawn to get donuts, and it’s like everyone got laid last night, saying, “Good morning,” and walking their dogs. Ah, to be loved, to be learned, to be lurking about. The donuts are so unnecessary–I
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Joyce Schmid ~ Poems
(Speaking for WS Merwin)
The date of my death
turned out to be the Ides of March
Paula no longer with me
to insist I stay at home
not there to warn me lions were being born
and ghosts were shrieking in the streets
and simple skies were catching fireI was too blind by then
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Kevin Grauke ~ Five Poems
John Cheever’s Cameo in The Swimmer (29:33–29:39)
Incognito at the poolside party,
the gin-soaked wreck steps forward to greet you,
his hearty and hale son. A dry kiss
on your date’s cheek is all the fragile fool
can manage before you steer her away to chase
more sun -
Beth Hahn ~ Already Later
The women who took shifts caring for Margaret wore tulip-pink scrubs, cardigans, and round-toed shoes that squeaked on the polished floors beyond her room.
“How are you today Mrs.—” they asked, glancing at the white board.
Margaret could see her
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Karen Regen-Tuero ~On the Corner of August and 19th
I was on my way to the office one morning, walking up August Avenue, wearing my gray suit cut so narrow I had to take short steps. With my paisley silk scarf tied in a bow, I suppose I looked like any other bank manager in the city. I
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Elizabeth Collison ~ Lydia’s Address Book
Sometimes these days when I first awake, when the room is still dark and shadowy, I find I do not always know where I am. I try not to let this bother me. The home is still new, my little cell here is new. Not remembering
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Alan Rossi ~ Our Last Year
Fall
In the kitchen sometime before seven in the morning, after waking before sunrise to the figure of his three-year-old-daughter, their youngest daughter, pulling him out of bed by grabbing his arm and saying, pull, pull, pull,
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Open for submissions July 1, 2022
NWW will be open for submissions July 1–14. Please see our submissions link above for details.
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NWW Quarterly
Dear Readers and Writers:
Effective today New World Writing becomes an online quarterly. We will be publishing four issues yearly, accepting submissions always, but
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Elina Katrin ~ Spring Grace
Born to a Syrian father and a Russian mother in St. Petersburg, Russia, Elina Katrin currently resides in Appalachia. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Hollins University, and her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in
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Anna Mantzaris ~ Night of the Living
I once consumed 33 turkey legs in an evening. I was an extra, one of the flesh-eating zombies, in the 1968 version of Night of the Living Dead. The camera pans in from a hillside and there I am, gnawing on what is supposedly a human limb. Throughout
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Sandra Kolankiewicz ~ Three Poems
LiLi Fre on Tears
She doesn’t care the man she turned down for
being so self absorbed is now famous.
What she remembers is he brought himself
to tears, thinking if he cried, she’d give in.
He chased her hair and ass and the little
scar -
Richard Weems ~ First Day Back
In the last moments before waking, Keli was a tour guide at a sheep-shearing plant. During a shearing demonstration for several families, the adults broke away to tinker with a row of rusted backhoes. Keli knew she’d get
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Carolyn R. Russell ~ Alphabet City
I had just arrived in Manhattan and was still wary of the subway, especially ones that scurried underground beneath mythic neighborhoods that I didn’t know, couldn’t imagine; I wasn’t only new in town, but had never
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Cheryl Snell ~ Tracking Time
So the oligarchs want their own space race? The old, when young, were actual pioneers. They came from everywhere to settle new land and sometimes they got lost. My own great- grandparents once planted the American flag on
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E.N. Walztoni ~ Heart of Ohio
I looked into the sun that came through the glass door of the Beauty House and did not think about any truth while I waited for my grandmother’s perm to set. No one made small talk with me in the plastic waiting chairs.
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Sarah Freligh ~ A Brief Natural History of ‘Law and Order’
Tuesday you’re the girl who was raped and stabbed and stuffed into trash bags within eyeshot of two executive high rises on the Upper West Side. The trash bags will lead Briscoe and Green to a suspect, a parks employee whose