The Scitico Water Tower
Looming black beside the railroad,
the Scitico water tower
shaded and shielded my childhood
from too much sun and puberty.
Dreaming of a railroad life,
obsolete before I was born,
kept me pleasantly infantile.
The water
On a perfect summer day in Annecy, France, Valerie rides a bicycle down a winding path toward Lake Annecy’s azure waters.
She reaches a patch of grass by the beach and pulls a baguette from her pack.
A boat passes pulling
The Sewing Table
It creaks at either end
if you don’t hold on
to it from underneath
when you move it
and we move it often
around the small kitchen.
Pine plank with engraved
six-inch rulers burned into to it
on both of the long sides
so that the
Manuel was up and about before dawn. He’d always start the morning with a cold shower, a ritual that relieved muscle soreness from the day prior and jolted his motor senses for the day ahead. To Manuel, a cold shower was also a daily test of pain
NWWQ submissions are closed. We will accept submissions again October 1–14, 2023. You will find below almost two dozen intriguing works
Mr. Kim takes attendance as the kids work on their warm-up: listing items for their survival backpacks. The all-faculty email had suggested coloring sheets as a calming measure, but Mr. Kim had wanted it to feel like a normal
I heard a voice I never saw.
“You’ve only got six months to go, so live.”
While walking on a trash-strewn beach,
regretting those squandered years,
I built an urgent mental spreadsheet.
I liquidated all my wealth, applied
for twenty-seven
They’d been going out for six months but this was their first trip out of town as a couple, using a weekend of winter break to browse Greenville, two hours and change from where they taught college in Atlanta. Back in
Saturday Afternoon, Ansonia
Sixty years ago this winter
I am still eight years old, grieving
the death of my mother.
The mêlée of children
teeming around me could be
a tableau from a painting by Brueghel.
We are awaiting our turns
on a toboggan
There must be a word
for it: waking up in the
night identifying a bounded,
discrete, yet repeated
phenomenon, so profound
and obvious you don’t need
to write it down, but yell
it loud in your head
so
A bell jingled as the door of Snackville Junction opened. The café sign with a fat chef holding a spoon blinked on. A man came in and sat at the counter.
“Little late for lunch, Mister,” said the waitress.
A passing freight train with piggyback
The violins were missing somewhere within the mirror. The strings curl around the elastic of my partner’s shoes as he lifts me up. It braids through the soft pink ribbons and snaps as it approaches my ankle. Still I count one, two, three, four,
Summer 1971, I lived with six women from Trinity College, DC. The only male housemate, I sort of slipped in and stayed. Previously, this Harvard Street residence had been the transient house of the Radical Lesbians four doors up. Once, while I was
The First
The drunken old street-wreck had been treading on exceedingly thin ice lately. (Not such a stretch on this portion of the equator in fact, where there were numerous rinks and sculptural fantasias of various kinds.) Emboldened recently, the
“The music I love is by dead people,” my father says.
We’re headed to Mom’s in his truck, but he’s on a different trip.
“Dee Dee, Joey, Johnny, Tommy. All gone.” He turns up the volume over the blast of the heater, and I eye the screen
I liked them almost green, she preferred them soft.
You might be thinking that I’m speaking of
the way we slurred our men, but when
I fucked up, when she thought I might become
three scoops of hazard drenched with nuts,
First day on the job and the only work shirt that fits Mohammad has “Bob” embroidered above his heart. Buttoning up the dark blue oxford, Mohammad jokes about how easy it is to spell. His first customer, a tiny old woman needing new windshield
Fred had a passion for vermin—to put it inaccurately. In fact, he had a passion for their extermination, for novel methods of effecting their capture and destruction. He had a passion, too, for obsessive observation of his traps; he needed to bear
Clouds limped up the marble steps of the sky
over Tower Road by the cemetery,
its gray slabs sticking out, snaggle-toothed,
from the soft gums of earth
that morning you showed me the note
left on your windshield, vaguely
Mama, I don’t pick fights with anyone
but if my telos as Master’s disciple is to be a megaphone
for others, don’t you wonder what happens
if when I speak all I hear are echoes?
In high school, running all the way to Chambers
I laughed