-
“By Bread Alone” by Danny Bellinger (wil’um)
When I was a young boy I learned that you could shoot a man for disrespecting your sister, even if he was her husband and your brother in law. All you had to do was trick your kids into believing the weapon was a cap gun by putting caps in the hammer, before you fired into the night air at the man who’d limp for the rest of his life for reasons unbeknown to me. That’s what my father did. My brother tells me years later that the fake cap gun is the reason why my uncle limps like he does.
-
“Regnum” A short story by Bronka Nowicka (translated from the Polish by Katarzyna Szuster) Artwork by Lula Bajek
Regnum
Mad Mary, Ursula, insane Nina, haunted Agnes, guide me. Let me stick my hands in the pockets of your housecoats, where the keys are nestled in the bundles of your handkerchiefs. Let me steal them and set the door to the kingdom ajar.
At night Nina kneads bread and weeps into it. In the kitchen, the milk gives off light until she pours it into dun flour and then it goes out. The woman kneads the dough in the dark. The table squeaks,
-
“Apartment by Teddy Wayne” Reviewed by LaVonne Roberts
Apartment is Teddy Wayne’s fourth novel and an easy read in just over 200 pages. Wayne’s novel gets to the crux of every writer’s angst in an MFA program: when you strip away the art of craft, is your writing any more interesting than yourself? Offering a rare glimpse of what happens in a workshop and the sheltered creative writer’s MFA community, Apartment speaks to what a privileged, highly-competitive MFA degree does or does not do for a writer. Moreover, it speaks to male identity in relation to male friendship.
Set in 1996,
-
“Long Vacation” by Jake Bauer
I am a person in need of a very
long vacation to a very cold climate.
There, one can ski out onto
the ice which is actually
a frozen-over cup of water
waiting on the nightstand
of a thief after a quick job. A boy
had to die. The world is big
then it is diamond-small
and you slip it in your pocket
on your way out the door, thinking
I’ll need this later.*
Jake Bauer is the Marketing Director for Saturnalia Books.
-
“Bird” by Jenna Le
We heard her and came running
We heard her
wings blurred
We heard her fly up the metal chute
only to find herself self-entrapped in our laundry room
self-buried in our linen hoard
her exit route barred
We heard her throat burr
We heard her
wings blurred so we came running
feet bare on the red-carpeted stairs
We heard her so we herded her
We harried her toward an opened window, a soft sunlit square
amid the hard boards
We hurried her and harried her
and herded her toward the open air
our broom-waving horde must have seemed to her a horror
for all that we heralded her liberty
*
Jenna Le authored Six Rivers (NYQ Books, -
“Interview with Helon Habila” by LaVonne Roberts
Helon Habila‘s fourth novel, Travelers, is a novel about African Diaspora in Europe. Told through a series of interlinking narratives, an unnamed Nigerian scholar’s experiences with migrants in transit, the real question Travelers asks is: what is home? Originally from Nigeria, Habila lives and teaches creative writing in the US at George Mason University and is the author of Waiting for an Angel, Measuring Time, Oil on Water,
