Image credit: Ashok Rajamani An Indian man named Anil Murthy wed a young, rather wealthy, young woman named Leenu Narayan. However, when this cherry-unpopped maiden married Anil, she did not love him. Actually, she did not like him. In fact, she did not even know of his existence at all. Leenu, at twenty-three, was informed by her father that she was to be a bride … Continue reading Sari Romance by Ashok Rajamani
When you press in the bedroom dark and whisper because our son is sleeping your story of the long bus ride to my 24th birthday party, the bakeries you visited searching for a carrot cake because I said it was my favorite, in Yantai where there was no such thing, and the baker who approximated one based on your description of mine, I can almost … Continue reading Carrot Cake by Cameron Morse
I’m a cynic who wants to be loved, a victim looking for another shove. I’m a mother to no one and a friend to the dead, I’m a freedom seeker stuck in my head. And if I close my eyes nobody else can see me. Continue reading Untitled by Jennifer Stephenson
I look tired and I feel sad, my boyfriend’s an alcoholic, I drink the leftover wine so he can’t it matters not, by his 4th visit to the shop the mirage is smashed. I angle my face away from the smell, I’m 27 and nesting, readying my womb, that by some miracle a bout of radiotherapy did not destroy! for what? I’m nowhere near ready. … Continue reading 27 and 11 twelfs by Jennifer Stephenson
A black-toothed wino on hands and knees scours the parking lot for a winning stub to the fourth race, and in my haste to reach the ticket booth in time for the seventh, what my uncle, a professional handicapper, calls the “surefire, can’t miss bet of the night,” I almost step on the wino’s callused hand. Passing through the turnstile I hear Achilles announced over … Continue reading Zeno’s Nephew at the Track by Adam Hanover
One cannot, perhaps, be an average hypersensitive member of what Bret Easton Ellis calls Generation Wuss in order to read his latest book (which he deems intended “for the Bret Easton Ellis completist”–an admittedly waning faction), called, provokingly, White. In case one isn’t familiar, Generation Wuss is a reference to the emotionally reactive millennial, a breed that is, at this juncture, no stranger to having … Continue reading Raise Your Hand If You’re A Millennial Who Has Ever Felt Personally Victimized by Bret Easton Ellis–And Vaguely Gotten Off On it
Please do not be kind to me, I think that’d be best; I’m alone and unaccustomed To any easiness. I might cease to struggle forth; I might just lose heart; For I’m tense, and your tenderness Might take me apart. I’m inflated with long patience; I fear your kind relief Might strike the balloon Of my striving grief. I’ve been propelled, light and rigid, And … Continue reading Breathed in helium… by Zeke Greenwald
Everyone owns a piece, a furrowed canopy casting dimness and light, a measureless magnitude of rapture and defeat. We are Prince Andrew at the battle of Austerlitz, on our backs surveying boundless lofty firmament. surrendering to tranquil silent drifts of stratocumuli, finding our meagerness within the scale. In temperamental squalls, tormenting dark wrinkles restless with despair, fling violent raindrops, hurtling us into prolonged deluge. But … Continue reading Sky by Thomas Wells
At one point, in the genesis of smartphone culture, the cost of an iPhone was astronomical, a luxury good intended, as always, to appeal to the rich as the initial demographic to get a taste of the future (think that prime example scene of 80s yuppie Glenn Gulia [Matthew Glave] in the The Wedding Singer coming in the house with a CD player and bragging, … Continue reading Fahrenheit 451 Vindicated Anew: On the Poor (and Daft) Being More Prone to Using Screens
…Of naive complacency—your hands— Wherein possibilities for poignant pleas and Bathetic poetry are rehearsed romantically— Hysterically—through looping piano motifs, And everyday despair. I am haunted—by hollow, harrowing Spaces devoid of dramatic redemption. Filling each frame of memory With, yet again, empty, barely defined— Rugged horizons—plummeting musical Phrases to the intersection of what once was Seen as bucolic but now a landscape found Only in—eternal ruin—hiding … Continue reading Interrupted Empathy by Syed Zaman
