Winter 2012: Words

by Rena Rossner. It started with a kiss, the first time I dreamt of Elijah the Prophet. He came to me completely naked under his dust-strewn white robes. I remember the dust because of its smell, somewhere between old books and mildew, and the powdery feel of him on my hands. He was kissing me, […]

by Kelsey Liu.   For my ninth birthday, my mother and father got me a school of koi fish. They hired a team of Mexicans to dig a hole in the back corner of their walled backyard, behind the little plot of palm trees they had gotten me for my eighth birthday. In front of […]

by Julie Prince. Epic. Unprecedented. Potentially devastating. You’ll hear these words as the TV newscasters ramp up the histrionics before an impending hurricane, especially in a region where they hit comparatively infrequently, like the Northeast, and especially in a hot and heavy media market like New York and the Greater Tri-State area. But it was […]

by Hunter Liguore. In the Old Days, as the waters fled the earth, and the birds again took to the sky, a time when the air was drenched in cedar smoke, from the cave fires that burned night and day, a time when the four-leggeds climbed out of Iná’s belly, the two-leggeds carried their fire […]

by Matt Stone. Okay, okay. Be warned. This is going to be an episode of the pot calling the kettle “black” of unprecedented proportion. I’ve written, by my best estimate, 2.5 million words over the past 5 years on the topic of health and nutrition. Excessive yes. But perhaps it has taken me these couple […]

by Paul Rogov. It had been quite some time since she had eaten, the first light of morn, before she saw her husband off at daybreak, before her hot, sipped pomegranate tea would swirl on her tongue and soak through a buttered slice of Russian rye.  She would write letters that morning.  Letters to her […]

by Harvey Lillywhite. The ordinary, painfully beautiful world, beyond words— those little cathedrals of imagination I live in: in the small garden outside my front door, an orange tiger lily, which was supposed to bloom in the early summer, just now, in mid-October, with the first frost in the nearby hills, blossoms radiantly, its 6 […]

by Amber Koneval.   It is much easier to write on walls than it is to write on paper.   Walls erode, worn down to polished pebbles, smoothed out of all midnight-made notches splashing away lines of chalk and flaking paint as seasons and hearts change.   On walls, the words are large enough that […]