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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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,
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.
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
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
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
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:
“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
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
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