The Committee meets at the usual time, five minutes past the hour, giving everyone a moment for machine-made coffee and a cigarette if they want it while the applicants wait in a large room with eight chairs (more than needed!) and some art outside
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Andrew Nicholls ~ Our Committee
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Pam Uschuk ~ Poems
SOLAR ECLIPSE IN THE LAND OF SANDSTONE HOODOOS
AND CRANESBetween hoodoos and the ghosts of whooping cranes,
day dies too soon. Secure in hogans, Dineh sing
against the sorrow of light’s vanishing.The white wolf flops under a rabbit bush, moans
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Nathan Dragon ~ What to Leave Behind
Sun came in through one half of a window—the other half was covered by a wardrobe that he used as a pantry.
Light through the uncovered half like a two by four.
The
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Stephen Delaney ~ How to Tell a Word
When the older boys lob it, jeer it in the hallway between classes—voices that say “I’m joking” … “We get it” … “I’m untouchable” …
When you type it and your dumb old Mac responds: a red underscore.
When, on the soccer field,
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Andy Plattner ~ Selection
Julia needs a few things. It’s a Sunday morning and she’s been up for a few hours. Sugar, baguette, Chapstick. Her husband Bobby, who is closer to her father’s age than her own, sits in the living room, watching political talk shows. He’s already
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Fiona Foster ~ Most Don’t, Then Some Do
The source of the accusation was a student who claimed the man had stolen her ideas for his last, most successful novel, stole them right out of her computer, hacking in, she said, even after she bought a new computer, carefully protected it, did not
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Chelsea Voulgares ~ Hotbox
The tough girls stand in the bathroom, applying Lee press-on nails. Simone’s their leader, and she leans against the grey cinder block and hotboxes a slim menthol cigarette. Her bangs fan up toward the ceiling, stiff and shining with extra-hold hairspray.
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Jeff Friedman ~ Bombs
Months ago, the bombs arrived in formation, hovering like blimps. At first, we thought they were participating in a military exercise, that they would be leaving soon, but they remained in place, silent except for a barely audible buzzing that disrupted
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Peter Leight ~ Four Poems
Reciprocal
We stay in the same room together, Vivien and I, even though the other rooms are empty. I sit at the table, and she sits across from me, we change places when we feel like it—we don’t need to turn on the lights in order to see each
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John Mancini ~ No Future in Oysters
My father was an oysterman just like his father before him—and just like I would have become had things not turned out the way they did. By the end of the sixties, the Bay was in poor shape, and the men who worked the water and drank at the bars
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Parker Tettleton ~ Five Poems
RINF
I’m opening another before I’m finishing, with no reliable internet, with a paperclip to up & down the zipper on my green coat, with you except you’re not you & you’re wherever you are, in an apartment full of me & my quiets,
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Reilly Cundiff ~ Five Poems
Self-Portrait as a Turkey Vulture
Must be some kind of man’s vertigo-
I’m Judy, I’m Madeleine, I’m Marilyn
Monroe in a black bobbed wig.
O Periphas, I’ve been your wife in bed,
a sign as pure as dove’s feathers, purer
than battery acid. But this is what -
Gary Percesepe ~ Another Poem That’s Not About You
Carpenters hammer below the shaded window. I rise from bed, light a cigarette, and walk to the window. The stony street displays the stillness on which buildings stand. It isn’t possible to be young again, yet a common light bathes the cobblestones. Time is the fire in which we all burn. See this windowsill? It shines with its lip of snow. White pieces drift past the cold pane, the smallest color of the small hours. Early morning has begun without us, and yet we are here. What am I now that I was not then? Somewhere down the street a car coughs, stutters, ignites. The day will fall of its own weight. The mystery of beginning, resumes.~
Gary Percesepe is the author of eight books, most recently The Winter of J, a poetry collection published by Poetry Box. He is Associate Editor at New World Writing. Previously he was an assistant fiction editor at Antioch Review. His work has appeared in Christian Century, Maine Review, Brevity, Story Quarterly, N + 1, Salon, Mississippi Review, Wigleaf, Westchester Review, PANK, The Millions, Atticus Review, Antioch Review, Solstice, and other places. He resides in White Plains, New York, and teaches philosophy at Fordham University in the Bronx. -
Karen Alpha ~ Kung Fu Love
My mother got me started on t’ai chi when I was a little kid, no more than five or six, I think. We used to go together to her class on Thursday nights at the elementary school gym. She sort of dragged me along.
The man who taught us was graceful,
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Gary Percesepe ~ The Bench
Everything could have been different, yet all remains the same. For years Batgirl circled the globe, her eyes puddled with tears. Euripides, I’m told, despite his fame, clipped toenails in solitude. What I mean to say is, be patient with me, I’m
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Michelle Ross ~ High Ground
A mother whose children go to my child’s school messaged me and four other mothers from the school because she was in a quandary. Corinne is her name. As most of us knew, Corinne said, she didn’t have a good relationship with her sister, who could
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Tiff Holland ~ Ending Up in the Ditch
All that summer my brother, Kevin, padded around the house in the Pink Panther costume my aunt had made him for his birthday: pink pajamas for the body and a matching tie for the tail. The pajamas were thick and sort of velveteen. Despite the fact
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Bram Riddlebarger ~ The Fisherman and the Tires
“Yep, just fishing for some tires,” said the fisherman. “I only need four. I’ll catch one, one day, and then I’ll only need three more. I’ll catch them, as well. Tires, they float by like glaciers. Like worn, rubber glaciers, and I only
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Jennifer Wortman ~ The Forest of Foodstuffs
In the four months since my husband died, I dreamt of him only twice. In the first dream, he ate berries, reclining in a shadowy room while our girls played on the floor. What a thrill to see him eating. No tumor blocking the way. No feeding tube.
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Sudha Balagopal ~ Spring Quarter, 1980
Sumi waits outside the dorm for thirty minutes before Mary, a fellow grad student, shows up. They’re late for the brainstorming session at Wray’s house.
The radio in Mary’s car crackles, volume on high since the windows don’t roll up. There’s a grassy