spring 2019
Table of Contents
Return to Home PageI Am Allowed to Break Up With You Amy Kenny
When the Time Comes
Soothing
Cameron Morse
orange socks
there are bad men at the top
Kate LaDew
Six Thousand Dollars
Cole Depuy
Terrigenous
Michelle Mitchell-Foust
Catastrophe that Nearly Brought Down a Plane
Sabyasachi Nag
Across This Body First Generation The Wall Jeni De La O
Tensions
Orange Bottles
Sean Singer
Sophocles
Martin Kippenberger's Bicycle
Charles Kell
Magnetic Resonance
Lisa Mulrooney
Sixteen Weeks in the Caribbean Apartment Laura McGavin
Against All Odds
Mary Lou Soutar-Hynes
Six Thousand Dollars
And they, since they / Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.
— Robert Frost
Kevin’s neighbors heard a loud pop.
Just another New Year’s Eve firework.
I got the texted photo of Kevin’s porch
crossed in caution tape
followed by “I think I’m going to be sick.”
It would take 3 years for the killer
to be found in Texas. Some guy
who owed Kevin a few grand in cocaine debt
shot him instead of paying.
My thumbs pirouetted above the keypad.
“No fucking way,” I typed. “Kevin knew
we loved him.” But I was lying,
of course I couldn’t know that.
I think that’s why I called his mother
in New Jersey the next morning. As she
bawled, I held the phone out at arm’s length.
Kevin had asked me if I wanted to spend
that New Year’s Eve together. The one where police
found his body face down
in his boxers, an exit wound beneath his forehead.
I told him, I already had plans.
When I think of Kevin, freebasing
Percocet, pills melting into sludge,
white smoke slithering into a hollow
pen, his cough like screeching tires,
I remember he died before his mother saw
what he had become. At his funeral, I hugged
his mother, she whispered, “Don’t be a stranger.”