spring 2019
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Against All Odds
Mary Lou Soutar-Hynes
Across This Body First Generation The Wall Jeni De La O
orange socks
there are bad men at the top
Kate LaDew
Tensions
Orange Bottles
Sean Singer
Sophocles
Martin Kippenberger's Bicycle
Charles Kell
Terrigenous
Michelle Mitchell-Foust
Magnetic Resonance
Lisa Mulrooney
Catastrophe that Nearly Brought Down a Plane
Sabyasachi Nag
Sixteen Weeks in the Caribbean Apartment Laura McGavin
I Am Allowed to Break Up With You Amy Kenny
When the Time Comes
Soothing
Cameron Morse
Six Thousand Dollars
Cole Depuy
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.”