Love Song To wear a black corduroy jumper with red roses that your mom picked out from Lord & Taylor for ballroom lessons in the seventh grade and which you wore more happily when you cleared plates at dinners for the Junior League when her friends praised you as you soaped the bowls is to … Continue reading
Issue 2 is voice driven and from the gut with first time publications and first publications in a long time; a teenage poet beside a poet published in The New Yorker; triggering fiction and essays that beat your heart and I can’t wait for you to start reading on March 30. Continue reading
Our fiction editor for March/April is Eric Boyd who is working on his first short story collection, “Brownfields”. His writing has been published by Guernica, the Missouri Review, Cheap Pop, Brooklyn Vol 1, and Luna Luna magazine. He appeared in Akashic Books’ “Prison Noir” anthology, edited by Joyce Carol Oates, as well as Trinity University … Continue reading
Our nonfiction editor for March/April is Ashley Ford, who does cool things at the Harnisch Foundation during the day. She’s a former staff writer at BuzzFeed.Com and a current serious yacht rock enthusiast. She’s also working on writing a book (or two), and co-editing the anthology Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture. Born and raised in Indiana, … Continue reading
Our poetry editor for March/April is Michelle Peñaloza who grew up in Nashville, Tennessee. She is the author of two chapbooks: landscape/heartbreak (Two Sylvias Press, 2015) and Last Night I Dreamt of Volcanoes (forthcoming, Organic Weapon Arts, 2015). Her poetry can be found in The Asian American Literary Review, The New England Review, TriQuarterly, Pinwheel, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of fellowships, scholarships, and awards from the University of Oregon, Kundiman, Artist … Continue reading
Thirty Soul Mates Today we’ll likely witness the first Norton Poetry Lecture partially delivered by keytar. Quiz: considering prior recipients— (a) Eliot, (b) Hancock, (c) Cage, (d) Kentridge— who might’ve said, there are no wrong notes, just better choices? My point being, recent thinking on the state of the soul mate has been … Continue reading
Seaside Paul was on the couch, tuning my guitar. He doesn’t know how to tune a guitar, so he was just tightening the E-string. I had already told him to stop once. The string was making that high pitched crackling noise, then it snapped. So I slapped him across the face. For a moment, it … Continue reading
Allure Song Allure 1. Suede Nude before the mirror, she scrutinizes her sapling legs and the ant-bite swell of breasts, searching for some allure there. She fingers the gold sequined thong, then steps into it the way she’d cross a low wall. Sliding into heels, she grasps her hips. Sashay, she thinks, sashay like the … Continue reading
Red Eye by Ahsan Butt Stuck. Laid over between the place I was born and the place I live. Four a.m. spent spacing out, stretching against a stiff seat, legs laid out on my Hilfiger bag. Denim man in the row behind me has never seen anything like me. Black greasy hair of … Continue reading
The James Franco Review 