Scott Hightower The architect of our party cuts the pringá, is himself a directory of pasos. On the wall behind him, a mirror features a giddy Bavarian floating in a deafening jar of beer. He smiles in the froth. His chin floats; likewise, his feathered green felt hat. “¡Tome su copa con pajarito!” Like being in Cadiz and correlating Puerto Rico. Or being in Granada and thinking of Baghdad or being in another point in Andalucía and...

Howie Good 1 Sometime during the night someone redrew the town line with a length of string and a piece of chalk. There are footprints that might be clues. A detective in an ancient derby sighs and crouches down. Some of the footprints belong to the green gloom of evening, some to ambiguous silence. 2 It’s another day, but the detective is wearing the same tearful expression. Perhaps it’s the only expression he has. He shakes his head...

Linda Nemec Foster Inspired by an art installation created by Chicago artist Cat Chow This is not the beginning of another year, lost circle of an Aztec calendar. Its concentric rings the lines that predict the future. This is not the evolution of a glassmaker’s vision, tempered by searing flames and a man’s breath. One eye permanently lost for the sake of beauty. This is not a whorled shell of black and white–created...

Linda Nemec Foster Inspired by the art of Bruce Erikson I was there once, in that landscape, bedroom a mess and only yourself to blame: childhood memory carelessly dropped on the floor, under the table, looking like a sleeping nude who’s forgotten herself. Why can’t that woman comb her red hair, get up from the bed, get dressed? Even the russet hibiscus languishing on the side table looks more alive. She’s probably been...

Bruce Smith Write like a lover. Write like you’re leaving yourself for another. Write like you’re de Beauvoir, object and subject. Write like you must rescue yourself from yourself, become scrupulous to the body and the rain that floods you with rage and the crude sublimities: there was a lip print on the plastic glass wrapped in the misty domestic interior of the room. Write like there’s evidence, there’s tenderness, like...

Bruce Smith I rode the Greyhound watching the twitchy things of the North give way to the sticky, bloodshot things of the South. No ground so burnt there’s not a church where I heard the Reverend amplify, rarefy, and glorify the word so that we were all in some state of sweating July. The ashy black man and the white bail bondsman held each other until they were blue. I heard the Reverend take the hymn of my mama and the whore’s...

Michael Tyrell The tuxed-up drunk, trembling the dorm’s lobby window when a bottle tipped him over. His squint not at me but past me to the one hundred keys glittering behind my post, the check-in desk, where all summer, I worked the Saturday insomnia shift. The ruse of looking down at the marble notebook, one-one thousand, then looking up: the drunk gone, like a movie ghost. The prank caller, the phone a bee-sting sound. The paper I...

Michael Tyrell I was born the summer of his disgrace. That’s always been my claim. And it’s a trait I despise in other people: hitching the intensely personal to the historical, making Watergate a lame pun for passage and delivery. But my mother insists on scandal. An unmarried mother, middle-aged— she swears her pregnancy didn’t show, even that morning she locked herself in the toilet and told her own mother to call...

Hillary Bartholomew By the signposts of the mind he reclines in the cradles of melted watches, a strand of moist pink gum winding between the liquid mirrors of convoluted canyons sweetness faded to wash line grey. A cold wolf howls at the blackened moon, below, the naked bones of whitewashed beeches stretch their brittle limbs, claws bared to rake the sky, bleeding harmonic dissonance through the ruptured hearts of buffo toads floating,...

Tobi Cogswell Pomegranate and pale green leaves shimmer their bean shapes on the brick wall, anchored by ancient stems twisted like rage. They beat out an endless message of “look at me” and true, it is impossible to look away. Other leaves broad, webbed, open palms in mid-slap shiver on each side of the road. The fanned branches capture an engaging light, an easing of the sun into its horizon. All the miracles that haven’t healed...