Ariana-Sophia Kartsonis’s work has appeared or is forthcoming inCream City Review, Crab Orchard Review, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Madison Review, Margie, and Verse Daily. Her book,Intaglio, won the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize and was published by Kent State University Press in 2006. Glimmer Trainpublished her story, Sundress, and Stephen King recently listed it as a “distinguished story” in The Best American […]
for Eliot Wilson There is a sky like no sky I’ve ever seen before and I want to hunker down in it. We were caught between a hurricane and what-happens-next. Your modus operandi was Hoping for the Best. Your weapon of choice: Departure. But you knew how to use magic as a verb and lasso […]
He got into a box of miracles and stole three. With the first he made it so no one would know he had run away. With the second he made himself a human boy forever.1 With the third, he made you, Bird, made good, up for all bad birds before you He’s the Eternal Child, […]
The maestro waves his baton1 Emu makes me sing new notes: a diapason appassionato I feel the blood-pain but can’t see the claw.2 Semiotic bird object-coding Barthes’ bliss einfuhlung abates. Why is it to be happy, we cannot know we are?3 Waking with Emu. Your face the first thing I see. My fine, feathered friend. […]
Ed note: The author preferred audio only for this piece.
Like nothing we’ve ever known, but then, we haven’t known much, have we, Charlie? It was a slow Sunday, she landed on the newspaper and had I breath, you know, it would have left me. Because God’s drawing left our maker’s in the wake of those wings. Glorious ornate things, the starkest black and white, […]
This is what she felt: buckle-end of her father’s belt, the dry-smacked kiss of a wooden spoon against her back, her brother’s hands touching her wrong. In a basement, my mother–a splintered girl–would wait thinking of their cold metal bodies in the silverware drawer all night. She’d gather them, knives, forks, spoons, bring them to […]
I want to take off with you, I want to go away with you, with all of you at once. Alvaro Campos* Let’s pinkie promise never to part ourselves out just because we know what it means to be many-ed as a hotel corridor. Each chamber of our hearts contains a different guest, and as […]