Welcome to our Spring 2023 issue. We’re delighted to bring you incredible new poems and short fiction from all across Europe and North America, both English and translated works, plus some brilliant essays and interviews. Featuring new writing from voices both new and familiar, our Spring Issue treats spring for what it is: a time for hope, new growth, and sudden awakenings.
Welcome to our Spring 2023 issue. We’re delighted to bring you incredible new poems and short fiction from all across Europe and North America, both English and translated works, plus some brilliant essays and interviews. Featuring new writing from voices both new and familiar, our Spring Issue treats spring for what it is: a time for hope, new growth, and sudden awakenings.
I was born a feral beast.
At the time of my birth, I tore my mother apart. It wasn’t on purpose. I think the circumstances caused it. There was a lot of blood in the hospital room.
My father, who gutted animals as part of his occupation, couldn’t bear to look.
He needed two dark beers and two shots of liquor to quiet the horror inside him.
I cut the line, honk my horn, chew with a full mouth, / then burp. The piercings in my ears have closed, / my heart has closed. And my clothes? I’ve stopped / doing laundry.”
Padma Rajendran’s works on fabric experiment with the clash and combination of patterning and storytelling. She received her MFA from Rhode Island School of Design and teaches drawing at Vassar College.
This Radha, unlike the one I spend most of my waking life with, drives a car with impeccable accuracy, almost as if she has eyes at the back of her head. This Radha, though cold and calculating, has been having sex with many men behind my back.
There’s something grounding about a god who knows his place. Yet there’s something terrifying about a god who knows how to bring us down with him.
The screaming could be heard in the outside corridor, someone had moved house out of me, never to return.
When Jack Mendenhall returns from Vietnam, Wendy thinks she is interested. She likes tough boys with swagger, dirty mouths, and nasty imaginations.
Husbands are not so hard to make: / my father is three microwaves / stacked on top of each other.
Away from the key rattle of an office, / exiled from a bathroom, a school, a hospital / into you I return like the scratch on a vinyl
Raised to be polite, / I offered each lawyer / tiny sweets, iced / water with a bitter twist
There are things ha-ha funny about going / blind though. Like that time he walked / wearing a three-piece wool suit into the deep / end of a swimming pool in a hotel in Italy.
We drove through the dark landscape. We wanted to get there before darkness fell, but dusk was already spreading over the area—earlier here than elsewhere.
There must be thousands of us non-Southerners with similar secret histories, people who profited from the crime of slavery and continue to do so.
Maybe the witch wasn’t a witch at all, not to start with at least. She was just a mother who couldn’t feed her babies …
The benefits of stone skipping have already made a profound effect on my writing. I’ve been able to challenge myself and grow as a writer in ways that I had not been able to before I took up stone skipping.
The baby onesie I stitched in the garage / became a colony of ants that nightly streamed / down my cheeks.
My joy / comes shot through with longing / it will not linger / for days like that acid gas. / I might have only moments / left before this exhilaration / dissipates
And lifting his eyes from the book, he saw on the threshold of the open door the tall thin figure of the wayfarer with the tangled white beard, the clear blue eyes sunken in their sockets, the long weather-beaten bluish caftan.
she is rising alone, pirouetting to her balcony / to throw her sapphires onto the street / as the audience gazes, she is laughing
I want bicycles to be my last word, my dying word — / not I love you, or bless you, or God forgive me, / but bicycles.
snow falls on horses hauling wood / beyond the opaque windows, / our seats shake over the tracks / and you touch my knee
I dream of holding a baby / a simple dream // My body will not let me // I dream of lying on the earth / a simple dream // My body replies, some day …
This dog / how he looks at me / as if we must have known each other / I pay and / we chat a little longer / once we were / like brothers he says
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