march 12th
happy friday! here are this week’s recommendations~
Poetry
Nicole McCaffety’s “Revival” in Leavings
“My grandmother spat my mother
Across the river & that familiar water hums”
Karthik Sethuraman’s “The Peacocks” in HAD
“Peacocks are just peacocks, and dead peacocks are just dead though
the word just can do a lot of work.”JP Seabrights’s “Reveal-Redact” in Full House
Jose Hernandez Diaz’s “Tuesday” in sundog
“He was actually riding a bicycle on the water. He is not Jesus.”
Fargo Nissim Tbakhi’s “American-Palestinian incantation” in Mizna and Poetry Daily
“absence makes the heart.
like water, I learn what shape to take”Darren C. Demaree’s “temple pieces” in Sepia
“a frog costume is worthy of a parade that never ends”
Rebecca Herrera’s “Hymn to Apollo” in The Aurora Journal
“Tyrian snails crushed and dyed the linen sheets draped over you
I was someone else then, burning frankincense at the altar”Agunbiade Kehinde’s “Supplication In A Large Body Of Water” in IceFloe
“Here is where the current hits or eats ferrying dreams,
the way of dying does not matter if it’s met with ease.”rob mclennan’s “Four poems for the Ottawa River” in n-o-b-o-d-y
“Meniscus: a poem, bound
by the ends.”
Matthew Garner’s “Heritage” in Diagram
“He drank too much and his teeth were too white and filled the mouth of a man who had a demon's smile.”
Fiction
Joshua Jones’ “Something New” in Okay Donkey Mag
“From across the park, another white-trimmed figure moved skyward, then another, then another. The brides saw each other and waved, did little twirls.”Rachel Carnes’ “Everyday Aviation” in Hominum
“I can’t make you stop crying yourself to sleep. Your mother tries to anchor you, but we don’t — Little man, I spend less time in this space where I feel safe every day, y’know?”Sarah M Jasat’s “When Meeting A Boy For The First Time” in Selcouth Station
“Do not ask the boy’s mother to stand so that you can sprawl across the sofa with one arm behind your head like Kate Winslet in Titanic being painted by Leonardo DiCaprio.”Hannah Rovska-Strider’s “A Son’s Lament: Phaethon’s Soliloquy” in the Lanke Review
“A dozen gods make the journey from the heavens to the soil every day, but the boy is acutely aware of his own mortality, so there is no point in lying to himself.”Erin Schallmoser’s “The Alchemy of Starlight” in Miniskirt Magazine
“The first thing my parents did when they got into town was stop at a metaphysical shop and get their auras photographed. My mother’s aura was a deep inky blue, and my father’s aura was a bright blinding orange.”
Nonfiction
Melissa Febos’ “The Wild, Sublime Body” in The Yale Review
“My mother had raised me vegetarian, and though I harbored no real desire to eat meat, sometimes, in summer, I would take a hunk of watermelon to a remote corner of our yard and pretend it was a fresh carcass.”Carol Claassen’s “MISSING MAN: A MEMOIR OF APPARITION / AUTHOR’S NOTES” in pidgenholes
CW: abuse
“This is a tale of apparition, approximation, aporia, aperture, apperception, apposition, apostrophe, and apology, among other words that separate, remove, approach, and bring together.”
Wade Bell’s “Father and Son” in Eclectica
“The deserts of America are enormous. The cities planted in them have bizarrely large footprints. Irrigate the wasteland, plant citrus groves, and people will migrate for the heat. Then housing developments will chew up and spit out the orchards.”Ashley Elizabeth’s “Mama Calls” in Helleborne
“Salmon stares back at me from the counter, and the plantains taunt me too, tell me I don’t know what I’m doing, tease me because I don’t even know how to boil rice because I never learned how to cook. Because this is a mother’s job, and my mother failed.”Catherine Flora Con’s “Mother Root” in Joyland
“It’s clear to me now that, during my childhood in South Carolina, my father missed Costa Rica. Sometimes he rushed us out of Mass early so he could catch their soccer team on TV.”