Karaoke: Encore


Here, a Brindis for All Who Weep Alone

Rocio Anica

I raced past the kennels each time. So many noses pressed against the chain link. Others cast their pink, brown, black noses downward, their beautiful tails curling inward or twitching a sad little wag as they turned away.

Poetry, Fiction, & Nonfiction

Self Portrait. A Boy in His Mother’s Clothes Singing Madonna’s “Live To Tell”. At Night. Alone.

Cassandra Whitaker

A bag of snakes, the hole inside / me.

RUNNING UP THAT HILL (A DEAL WITH GOD)

After Kate Bush
Monica Rico

It claws / it doesn’t begin with an itch / a single hurt / a pointed branch

Some People Think they're Owed a Bond Girl

Karyna McGlynn

to bend over whenever. This belief reaches / quietly into their bone marrow.

Ghosts of Scene Sites Past

Seán Carlson

On an external hard drive stored in a closet somewhere at home, I have a photo from the first concert I set up, a moment captured on a roll of film and later scanned and sent via email.

After The Reading, A Man Asks If I Hate My Father

Janiru Liyanage

nother time, a couple pressed me to / forgive my family, they said all the best art draws from love, not anger / but I barely heard them over the Frank Ocean song

Well, It’s Not Like It Used to Be

Patrick Duane

I was born March 24th, the same day as Harry Houdini, so my family used to take annual trips to the Harry Houdini Museum in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

Entomb/In Tune: Earl Sweatshirt’s Black Lyric Mode

Joy Priest

But for me, Earl’s short poems (sometimes, I’m willing to concede, laid over monotonous beats) are speculative and visionary. They map a modern mind, short in attention, fighting to be audible above our cyber industrial reality—its alienating information storm of iPhone notifications. They take us beyond the day’s meaning-emptied habitual speech.

Last Christmas

Colin Ainsworth

The last time I was here I was really in here. I have been here. I know that I have been here. These people are in my home and they are watching my TV.

dionysus is the only sober person at karaoke

E.B. Schnepp

super impose me neon, berry-tinged / fingertips left smudges across everything I touched.

When Beyonce Hits, And Sunset is Pink And Baby So Baby Blue

Cassandra Whitaker

What’s beyond the two lights at the edge / of the bay bridge tunnel blinking / out of turn, one a bit more butch / than the other

My Massage Therapist Asks if the Pressure’s Too Much

Abbie Kiefer

Let me tell you, Lil—I’m here to be borne down on.

The Moss Takes Us to an 80s Sex Shop

Karyna McGlynn & Fez Avery

But we arrive to find it’s been co-opted by a cocktail bar. / The Moss wants to bounce but we’re already here.

Let’s Play College

Karyna McGlynn & Fez Avery

Alright fine: let’s play Chubby Bunny / naked in the sprinklers, I said.

Here, a Brindis for All Who Weep Alone

Rocio Anica

I raced past the kennels each time. So many noses pressed against the chain link. Others cast their pink, brown, black noses downward, their beautiful tails curling inward or twitching a sad little wag as they turned away.

From the Archives

One Hundred Demons: An Interview with Jami Nakamura Lin

Christina Berke

Jami Nakamura Lin is a Chicago-based writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Electric Literature, and Bat City Review, but you might know…

Lobster Dinner

Alexandra Kleeman

The lobsters were dead in a pile and with a froth on their shells they waited and watched us undress each other...

Baba

K-Ming Chang

But in another language, in my father’s mouth, there is a tenderness to the tone he takes, so that the word beat overlaps with other words, some of them meaning I miss you. He says beat as if the word shares a border with laughter. As if it is just a lost synonym for love.

Rites

Savannah Johnston

Papa blew way over the limit on the field test, but he swore it was a set-up. He kept a loaded assault rifle next to the front door, and a handgun under the seat of his truck.