• S Is For Shame

    Jennifer Habel

    Spring 2017

    If a child needs a band-aid and his mother doesn’t have one
    Jane has one. It is deep

    in the zippered compartment of her purse, its wrapper
    worn as an old dollar.

    Matches, bottle opener, tweezers, ibuprofen.
    Nail file, bug spray, chapstick, sunblock.

    Jane never did buy the tool to break
    her sinking car’s window.

    Whatever happened to her swiss army knife
    with all its clever integrity?

    Simone’s dad is early
    for Ballet pickup.

    Jennifer Habel is the author of Good Reason, winner of the Stevens Poetry Manuscript Competition. Her poems have appeared in the Believer, Gulf Coast, the Massachusetts Review, the Southeast Review, and elsewhere.

    Read More

    On First Reading Susan Wheeler

    Kathleen Ossip

    All around, on shelves, final lines shrivel,
    dead filaments in a lightbulb. Who can stop
    without subtracting? Only, it seems, she.

    Fisherman's Stew

    Jowhor Ile

    When I come back, he said, in our next life, I will find you. What surprised her was that he had said the words out loud: she had found him to be a man who promised little but did much more. I will look for you too, she said. That way it will take us half the time.

    Mother Ireland

    Edna O'Brien

    Leaving Ireland was no wrench at all. I took the mail boat, like most others, sat up all night, watched the drinking, the spilling, walked the deck, remembered how Thackeray and Heinrich Boll had come in by boat to write leisurely about it, remembered the myriad others, natives, who had gone out to forget.

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