• Instructions

    Austen Leah Rosenfeld

    Fall 2018

    Start with description.
    Talk about the dark of the desert, the way the stars are grooves cut by ice skates.
    Pretend it was November.
    Decide that the wind came from a storm in the sea.
    Imagine your mother was asleep, dreaming about foxes.
    Tell us that a slot machine is just a night-blooming flower.
    Tell us that deer are drawn to salt because they believe it will change them.
    Then say people never learn their lesson and that’s why they write poems.
    Now fix your gaze on a beetle.
    Tell us that nothing could possibly exist beyond this beetle.
    Explain that even if something did exist beyond this beetle, it would be irrelevant.
    Confirm your theory by repeating it again in a different language.
    Leave no room for argument.

    Austen Leah Rosenfeld received an MFA from Columbia University. Her poems have appeared in Salmagundi, Zyzzyva, AGNI, Indiana Review, Narrative, Carolina Quarterly, and elsewhere.

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    The Sanno

    Don Lee

    “Promise me something, Alain,” she said to me one night. “Promise me you won’t end up to be a useless panty like your father.” Panty was Hawaiian pidgin for wimp, wuss. I didn’t know how to respond to this. “Promise me you’ll stand up for yourself once in a while, be a man,” she said. “Promise me you’ll have some balls.”

    Getting Good

    Richard Russo

    I was in junior high—as middle school was called back then—when I heard my first live band. The venue was the gym where we hormone-driven eighth-grade boys ran laps, climbed ropes, played dodgeball, and wrestled, in the process converting our recent cafeteria lunch—half a ham-salad sandwich and a shallow bowl of Campbell’s tomato soup—to methane. I’d been to dances before at the YWCA, but in that smaller gym a DJ spun records. This was different.

    Linea nigra

    Nikky Finney


    silently watching for the arrival,

    the most golden mortise of after
    afternoon sunlight, Such are the
    vicissitudes of life    , my girl
    fingers tracing the glass of here,
    past there, in between green-blue

    waves,

    Merch

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