New World Writing

Dear Readers and Writers:

Effective today New World Writing becomes an online quar­ter­ly. We will be pub­lish­ing four issues year­ly, accept­ing sub­mis­sions in the first –more

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 –more

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 –more

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 –more

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 –more

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 –more

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 –more

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. –more

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 –more

Uncle Biff ordered
five five-gal­lon buckets
of slime
and a sack of rainbow
cap­sules from a Chinese
cat­a­log. A rack
of quar­ter machines were dumped
in the creek behind
Bowl-a-Rama.

“Bernie says I can post
them up in the vestibule,”
goes –more

Throw in a woman. Throw in a man. Throw in a broke­down Chevy. Throw in a body in the trunk.

Throw in a gas sta­tion. Bramble and brush. Hopper pumps and rat­tlesnake shiver.

Throw in the hot armpit sun.

Throw in the woman’s hus­band, –more

Finally, after I got my offi­cial dri­vers license and could dri­ve at night, my friend Randall Meeks’s father hired me out to tough­en his son, or at least get the boy inter­est­ed in some­thing oth­er than musi­cal the­atre. –more

The Incident

The neigh­bor­hood seems most­ly safe, although
at night one can often hear a lot of gunshots.
At least there hasn’t been a dri­ve-by shoot­ing today,
no police cor­don­ing off the block, ask­ing all
the neigh­bors what they saw and –more

Ethel’s Pot Belly

A beguil­ing, hat-wear­ing woman of forty, Ethel once liked the way she could appear skin­ny or roly-poly to oth­er women, depend­ing on how hos­tile they seemed. The slope of Ethel’s pot bel­ly was so flex­i­ble –more

In the mid­dle of the night, I wake up in a room that isn’t my room. The room is huge, as big as a cathe­dral, and the walls and floors are com­prised of yel­lowed pan­els of oak and gray blocks of gran­ite pol­ished smooth by –more

Ted,

I know you will think this is silly—just typ­ing this email, I am aware it is sil­ly. (Have you noticed how com­put­er screens func­tion like the prover­bial “cold light of day”? How they cast a with­er­ing blue light on one’s anxieties?).

Nevertheless: –more

“On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being the low­est, how severe is your pain now?” the boun­cy young med­ical assis­tant asks with mis­placed enthu­si­asm. Fifty-eight friends on Facebook offer their thoughts and prayers. But just –more

It is on Sundays that I have a chance to lunch with George. If I don’t count the ran­dom vis­its from my agent, then for the rest of the week I am all alone. Only on this day, George is com­plete­ly free and tru­ly will­ing to –more

Self-Portrait as an Absent Person Who’s Not Even Here

I’m not in trouble
or anything,
I’m putting on some eye­shad­ow and pulling the shad­ows over my eyes,
pulling up my hoodie,
pulling back my hair
to get it out of the way:
absence isn’t just turn­ing away or being –more