First Proof
The boy who is coming home with part of himself missing is the man’s nephew. The man, Silas, receives the news and hangs up the phone, numb. He wants a drink. He doesn’t want a drink. He wants time to move backward.
we consummated our marriage / on a bed littered with sour faces / of dead presidents, liberated livestock / sweating through the dollars.
She was coming out of the library when she saw him. Their paths had crossed a couple of times before. Three, to be exact. More or less under the same circumstances. He was riding an orange bicycle, and a little girl was standing behind him on the pannier rack.
The condition of most of our lives is that of continuous flight, in some manner or form—flight from faulty logic, from place of birth to the place we alight, from situations that no longer serve us, from political precarity—flight, as in rupture.
This is a story of? / a woman lying on her? / a back?—aback—with her? / a face hidden and a?
I disrupt the concupiscence of tube worms / where your snowy owl eye consults among white crusts / the venom of my gymnodactyl eye / which bribes the slag of trilobites
During his twelve years in New York City, Bosun, who went by Bo, got into some bad business with an import-export company in Queens. It turned out the company was dealing in stolen goods, and Bo, who drove a truck for them, was eventually caught one winter on the bridge between Manhattan and New Jersey.
“Let him sleep. He’ll be alright if he sleeps.”
Poets really think they’re doing the most with the least …
Her concerts, broadcast the first Thursday of each month at 9:30 PM Cairo time, brought life to a stop throughout the Arab world.
A collaboratively drawn comic.
Winner of BOMB’s 2019 Fiction Contest, selected by Renee Gladman.
The house was quiet and the world / Greased my palm / The air outside a weighted blanket / Scarab shells rising with the pitch of their hiss / In the shadow of a bodacious oak / I thought of a famous actor
“I preferred that others not be neglected but found the neglected gender suited me better than the not-neglected genders. I found my neglected gender to have a certain style. A style I like.”
the call to prayer plays on a victrola. the vinyl sat so long on an ellington…
I dreamed of home invasion, and of a great celebrity / hidden inside a series of rooms, each hermetically / separated by glossy, voice-activated doors, each / bordered on both sides by facsimile rooms, identical
