Issue 79

Spring Fling

2019
,

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Featuring
Jo Ann Beard / Aleksandar Hemon
Description
Editor's Note

Cicero famously said, “Sweet is the memory of past troubles.” This bittersweet interplay that exists between remembered pain and joy is fertile ground for several of our authors. In “Flycatcher,” Aleksandar Hemon teases apart the subtle social navigations teenagers make, willingly or unwillingly, to distinguish themselves, and how these choices reverberate through time and memory. In Rachel Eliza Griffiths’s poem “Good Mother,” she writes, “We held on & praised the nameless thing / that makes us what we think we aren’t strong enough / to know.” The urge to stop time and with it a collective feeling, animates Maria Lioutaia’s story “Preservation,” in which Lenin’s preserved body begins to disintegrate and the mausoleum’s director turns to the living in order to suspend the inevitable.

As when you experience spring, when you read great writing you can feel as if there are powerful, unseen forces just below the surface. You can feel their pull, and you probably have a very strong sense of what they look and feel like. Sometimes it helps to have someone help you see and name them. Let our writers be your guide in this time of renewal and regeneration. Happy, or at least thought-provoking, spring.

Table of Contents

Fiction

Jo Ann Beard
What You Seek Is Seeking You
Maria Lioutaia
Aleksandar Hemon
Flycatcher
Xavier Navarro Aquino
Katie Arnold-Ratliff
See You
Robert Travieso
Anvil

Poetry

Jericho Brown
Of My Fury
Vista
First Class
Rachel Eliza Griffiths
Laetitia Burns
Fuck You Bob Dylan This One Is Mine or Black Snake
If By Torch
Mai Der Vang
Authorization to Depart Ravaged Homeland as Biomedical Sample
Lily Zhou
Airea D. Matthews
Logical Disjunction
Lip Manegio
Suji Kwock Kim
Prayer for a Son
Prayer: At the Migrant Hospital
Yvonne Amey
Behind Bars, You Said, There's Freedom to Join a Chain Gang
Addicts
Gabriel Fried
The Truth
Christian Barter
Gathering Swallows
Revision
Keetje Kuipers
Gabrielle Calvocoressi
Affirmation Cistern I Love and Tend My One and Only Body
Nobility Cistern We Have Stalwart Friend
Zehra Naqvi
Dear Baba
C. Dale Young
Prometeo
Brendan Constantine
Where Do You Get Your Ideas
Andrea Cohen
Delcarative
Field Trip
To The Sun
Seth Amos
Rumors of Elijah Phineas Flood
Don't Get Weird
Sarah Giragosian
The Fourth Anniversary
Reginald Dwayne Betts
A Man Drops a Coat on the Sidewalk and Almost Falls Into the Arms of Another
Toi Dericotte
Gifts from the Dead
Telly Redux: Sharon Asks Me to Send a Picture of Little Fishy Telly
Yanyi
from The Year of Blue Water
from The Year of Blue Water
Donald Platt
Black Prince

Nonfiction

Amy Lam
Her Tattoo is My Name & My Name is a Poem
John Freeman
Alia Volz
Lottery

Lost & Found

Alyssa Knickerbocker
On Kathleen Winsor's Forever Amber
Tana Wojczuk
On Dr. Ruth Barnett and Doug Baker's They Weep on My Doorstep
Kavita Das
On R. K. Narayan's The Painter of Signs
Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint
On Ama Ata Aidoo's Our Sister Killjoy, or Reflections from a Black Eyed Squint