Archive | June 2015
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DISTANCE by Amanda Doran
A viewing for a twenty-something isn’t normal and everyone knows it. People struggle with the proper facial expression, whom to greet, where to look, when to move, how long to stare at each picture, whether to hang up a coat or drape it over an arm. It can be a forty-five-minute utterly self-centered struggle over […]
ELEGY FOR SKYMALL by D. Gilson
When I look at things, I always see the space they occupy. —Andy Warhol Under the heading “Yes, commas DO save lives,” are three items—T-shirt, sweatshirt, and 7” x 12” plaque, all in a color described as Chocolate—bearing two lines: Let’s Eat Grandma and Let’s Eat, Grandma. This is exactly the type of gift […]
SLOUCH by Gale Acuff
In Sunday School today I thought I died and went to Heaven but it was only a dream so I’d only fallen asleep and when I woke I saw Miss Hooker, my Sunday School teacher, standing over me the way I guess God will when I wake up dead in Heaven, for just a while […]
STRONTIUM-90 by Jeff Burt
My mother wore a scarf and scolded us to warm our ears: we could not chew the snow for soot and strontium-90 lurked in every lick, upper atmosphere churning chimney bits and atomic testing isotopes. My dad laughed how the ash could strengthen bones and the isotope deplete them so if they worked as pulleys […]
ACADREAMIA by M.V. Montgomery
a violation An official-looking envelope arrived for me through intercampus mail labeled, “Your Ticket Package.” We had recently outsourced security to a private firm—although no one yet, to my knowledge, had observed a new presence on campus. I opened the package and several forms spilled out. One appeared to be a survey; another, a list […]
WAS by Jed Myers
Her flesh on my flesh, mine on hers, time after time in that thoughtless trance— now I see the two luminous blurs in a cloud of the past. It still occurs in reruns projected upon the expanse before me, her flesh, and mine on hers, times on the porch, the couch, the stairs to our […]
THE HAMILTON by Kenneth Weene
It was my father’s— the only thing of worth or history. Patina-ed stainless, oblong, always needing winding, keeping nearly time, and filled with memories we had not spent. Hamilton, seventeen jeweled, a present on the old man’s marriage; passed not by testament but default from undertaker to son, who, in this night table drawer, keeps […]
IN SEARCH OF SILENCE by Enid Kassner
The hum was inescapable, stealing my sleep. The hum dominated, demanding attention, obedience. The hum made me frantic for silence. And my anguish urged me to confront it. For several long years, I had searched for strategies to untangle the snarls in my marriage. By this point, I had retreated to the guest room at […]
TWO POEMS from “AWKWORDS” by Holly Painter
Gam This one’s not exactly dirty, just strange. Gam means leg, but while I often say leg, I rarely use gam. Why not? Why not change it up? Well first, I’d get a lot of “Beg your pardon?” Most people don’t know what gam means. Even Word and Gmail underline the word in red […]
IGNORE, IGNORE by Heidi Vornbrock Roosa
Marie noticed that their mother hadn’t re-braided Lulu’s hair in three days. It frizzed out in light brown puffs from each turn of the weave, though the sun-gold ends still curled in a perfect Shirley Temple coil below the elastic hairbands. Lulu sat at the kitchen table, picking at the edge of the chipped copper […]
3QR: The Three Quarter Review 