The Other

Certain beliefs hold that the serpent, while swallowing itself, writes its history on its intestinal walls, passing along lineage and gods, but the most vital notion for the ceremonial inscription, the sun-is-upward convention, that which opens and closes the circle. Outside Is Trouble Rooms fail because we made them. Comfort comes from lack of architectural [...]

THE FOURTH WAVE KISSING PARTY Let’s not invite the whole class; let’s pretend that we are the bosses of the fourth wave. [The Fourth Wave, JoyceAnn McManus would say. In all caps, she would say] and when she is done being the boss of the way words will appear, we’ll kick JoyceAnn out of the [...]

Point-Blank Sonnets: Jessica Piazza’s Interrobang Why did the interrobang fall out of fashion‽ The title of Jessica Piazza’s debut poetry collection is also the punctuation mark, “designed for use especially at the end of an exclamatory rhetorical question,” according to the Merriam-Webster citation that serves as one of the book’s epigraphs. Every good book raises [...]

________________________________________________________________ Jill McKenna Reed is a poet, writing instructor, and beekeeper living in Portland, Oregon. She is co-editor of “Winged: New Writing on Bees,” an anthology of modern literary writing, forthcoming in October of 2014. Jill earned her MFA in Creative Writing Poetry at Portland State University. She is a native of the Chicago area.

The Difficult Drama of Nature How cool the air above the horizon—the sky lights up As you take your leave. And this leaving feels severe It feels the way trees look as they clutch rough edges of land All the while being shaped by a persistent wind. I can be traced by satellite. Here is [...]

This essay will be posted in three sections. Part 2 will post on Thursday, October 16th and part 3 on Thursday October 23. Place plays a substantial role in establishing environment. Place can be used as a metaphor to define abstractions, as a backdrop that can help set tone or even as a character which [...]

The Magic Word: ‘Gypsy’ Witchcraft, Love, and Breaking Tradition in Luminiţa Mihai Cioabă’s Poem “The Apparition of Choxani” “Magic,” she said, “is only in words, in the naming.” - Qristina Zavačková, from “Magic and Magpies—Akhaljiben the Kakaraske” I first discovered Luminiţa Mihai Cioabă, Romanian-born Romani poet and fiction writer, when I bought Roads of the [...]