Small Hours (Truman State University Press, 2014), the debut collection by Ilyse Kusnetz (1966-2016), won the the 2014 T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry and was a 2014 Foreword Reviews’ INDIEFAB Book of the Year Awards Finalist. Kusnetz received an MA in creative writing from Syracuse University, and a Ph.D. in contemporary feminist and postcolonial British literature […]
Never mind how they met. Sometimes in stories, the inexplicable happens. At first, the river of the universe is too wide for the parted lovers to cross. Their tears call the birds from the sky, and flocks of magpies gather to form a bridge, wingtip to wingtip, offering up their hollow bones for love’s sake, […]
New at sea, laboring with block and tackle, he and his crew are loading ammunition onto the Tampa a 240-foot cutter, when the sheave breaks, and crates of 3”/.50 caliber bullets begin to plummet toward the men below. All let go of the rope except my father. He holds to that line as he’d later […]
Never look a gift horse in the mouth. -St. Jerome, On the Epistle to the Ephesians About The Last Supper this much is known: left unfinished by da Vinci, it moldered on the refectory wall, twenty damp Milanese winters, until Vasari dismissed it as merely a mass of blots. Over time, monks hammered a doorway […]
Bodies piled like lumber, tottering bodies withered to bone, lampshades fashioned of human skin, some displaying tattoos; shrunken-head paperweights, bisected heads preserved, suspended in transparent resin, to better view the Jew brain. Local townspeople trucked in. Now you can’t tell the world you didn’t know. One woman presses a handkerchief to mouth and nose, a […]
In the factories of America during the 19th century, girls hired to make sulfur matches would dip the match-ends into a chemical vat, then lick the tips to make them stiff. The vats were filled with zinc sulfide, a radioactive substance about which no one warned them, so when their teeth fell out, and their […]
Wheels of hay – sun-fired, each a sealed universe, replete, imperturbable. Shadows are sarsens here – autumn spilled on the ground, winter gathering in the sky. Come to bed tonight, curl your body into mine. From next year’s furrows the braided gold will rise. Time enough, my love to exhale the breath we did not […]
Let’s face it, this isn’t the first time a god has foisted himself upon a woman. In Jan Prevoost’s version, with one hand outstretched, the angel Gabriel drops his bombshell: see this dove, yea he is really the son of God and will soon be checking into your holiest of virgin wombs. His coffee-and-cream wings […]