We ring in the new year with our 37th issue. All of us at Fogged Clarity hope you enjoy our January edition and the coming year. Benjamin Evans Executive Editor, Fogged Clarity January 2012 Table of Contents Fiction Colin FlemingColin Fleming is a contributing writer for The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Boston Globe and The New York Times Book Review. His fiction has appeared in Boulevard, Texas Review, Slice Magazine and The...

The Pulitzer Prize finalist and Harper Lee Award-winning poet reads and discusses his work.

The debut album from Grammy Award-winning violinist Justin Robinson and his band the Mary Annettes.

Jonathan Wells Not just a crack but a chasm in the floor Not just a room but a helix of rooms Not a hall to follow but a hallucination of halls Nor a load-bearing wall but the Great Wall of China Not one mountain between us but a range of mountains Not one sea but generations of seas Not just the harbor of Harbortown but the Gulf of Aqaba Not just bread to share but flour and salt Not a cold mug but a mortuary of teacups Not the...

Jonathan Wells Dogs fetch an unthrown ball and children smash softly together. Finches twitch in the upper branches, antennas for the soul of winter. I lie down rib by rib across the sled’s hard slats and kick into the terror of the hill. The horizon ridge holds out an unstirred cup of gray. Words I’d nurtured surge past me, faces, situations. The glow beneath what’s spoken ravishes like an orchid blossom on a browning stalk. My...

John M. Anderson That world was the ivory v, flush with the basketball floor of the pinball machine—I could open a door. The landscape was painted in that Bad Day at Black Rock matinee poster style with counters ringing tens of thousands of points with the same springing bell sound the Esso gas pumps made all the way to L.A. My father would have found a percentage in the way half of the quark’s globe spins backward in time,...

John M. Anderson The hayloft doors were wide as they’d go and the shining snow on the ground outside crowded the barn ceiling with projected light that rose into those inhabited rafters warm against the slotted wind pouring frost like a hard mist through chinks between the back wall’s warped planks. Shining I entered—ladder, trapdoor—to bow and scrape among my old shivering shadows: myself against the wall, self thrown careless...

Stephanie Elliott “Mama!” her baby cries as she begins readying them both for the bus ride. “Shhh, Wendy, princess,” she soothes the baby with coos and talk. “It’s cold out. We must dress warm. So the snake won’t bite!” With a yellow blanket, the mother swaddles the little form into an almost unrecognizable rigid mass, then covers herself with her own coat, picks up her baby and throws a top blanket over them both, bonding...

Amy Lemmon You, a two-year-old with a Goldwater button on your nightstand, better that the television isn’t color, better that you grab the pull string of your duck on wheels and toddle to the playroom, dragging a rose-print Turkish towel down the stairs and across the sculpted carpet, stop to study the particular green-brown sludge of its color and manage an alley-oop past the coffee table with the sharp edge that will have its way...

Scott Hightower “What will survive of us is love” Philip Larkin December, 1971. A light snow. The Taft Hotel. Our room across the street, overlooked the Winter Garden stage door. I was green and this was to be my first taste of Broadway. By the time the lights and trumpets lifted on the “Loveland” number, I was lost in years monogrammed across silk sashes, wigs, and in the follies of relationships...