Current Issue

Nonfiction, Online Feature

Each Is Me

Pamela Macfie

I do not remember anything in the room beyond its oversized desk, the squeaking chair he tipped to the wall, and the straight-backed chair I took before him. No. That’s not right. I remember that dust motes sifted the air. That the leaded panes of the window broke the sky into pieces. I remember feeling small.
He asked, “When are you going to fuck me?”
Why did I laugh?

The Conglomerate

Staff Picks: Thanksgiving

The Sewanee Review

Winter is upon us, and though the seasons have changed, the times have yet to follow suit. Our staff came together to share some reads varied in subject—Nietzsche, the tragic lives of artists, apocalypse narratives, and pandemic poems—but tethered by theme: imaginative escape and the vitality of hope.

The Conglomerate

The Corona Correspondences - Afterword

Adam Ross

How are we going to get out of this?

Poetry

Points of Clarification

Major Jackson

I swear I can reach up and touch your laughter.

Nonfiction

The Dangling Days

Steve Yarbrough

Most importantly, he felt the need to make music. “Without music,” he said, “I’m sure I’d go crazy.”

Fiction

Ethel

Molly Dektar

I watched for a long time and thought what my life would have been like if I really were an orphan, if Ethel had raised me on the Lower East Side. I usually felt like her guest—she was so considerate of me. At times I felt like her husband, coming home after my workday to eat food she’d prepared. I didn’t know why it was hard to feel like her daughter.

Poetry

Poem for a Man I Thought I’d Never See Again

Sarah Manguso

It was a firstness that I thought I’d never find again—the firstness of it, which in the dream comes just before the firstness of death.

Fiction

Water Moccasin

Maria Anderson

Was I like the calf, I wondered? Had I made a two-headed life, where I went along with my husband’s wishes and kept mine separate, instead of mixing what we wanted together like normal couples?

Review

The Steadfast Attention of Sigrid Nunez

Tara K. Menon

In Nunez’s vision of the world, writers are like ballerinas: willing to torture themselves for the beauty of truth. The difficulty of communicating our feelings to others is a source of much suffering. The best we can do, Nunez’s novels argue, is to pay tender attention.

Craft Lecture

Why Do the Poets Still Speak of the Gods?

Ange Mlinko

If indeed we shall never return to our birthplace; if indeed we have been abandoned by the gods; we are still answerable to the names of our beloveds.

Poetry

Patmos IV

Bruce Bond

The end is unconscious the moment it arrives. Every decade,

the apocalypse comes. It goes. Some are changed, or feel

changed, some cast out, weary as meat, and a lioness appears.

In a better dream, my body sees its end in every other.