Nancy L. Weber’s fiction has appeared in Evergreen Review, Brooklyn Rail, and other publications. She has an MFA […]

When I got to 34th Street, I decided to go into Macy’s. I was thinking about the dead tooth. In time it would turn black. I walked past the rows of makeup counters and realized that I had no idea if I was pretty.  Growing up around Louise, her sisters and I learned that it didn’t matter if we were pretty – all that mattered was that we were not Louise. I stepped up to a lipstick display and found the matte brick-colored shade that everyone wore that year. In a business card-sized mirror on a counter display I watched as I dragged the matte brick color back and forth across my dry lips. I smiled, revealing the dead front tooth. It was like all the other teeth – white, luminous. I put the lipstick back in the display and walked out of the store, back out onto Broadway.

Patricia Farrell lives in rural Oregon. Trained as a biologist and landscape architect, she received a certificate of […]

Are you stepping onto the rungs? Clenching/cold mettle in your hands?/Remember this. The last step/is hardest, as if you didn’t know.

…like a farmer’s market or a collective, we provide space for working artists to show the fruits of their collaborations of words, themes, rhythms, imagery, machinery…

Came so fast; couldn’t come fast enough; gone before you know it.  Summer!  Traffic jams, last minute work […]

She locked the door and turned off the lights. Together, they moved bookcases in front of the door and piled books atop of them; book towers failed to cover the door’s slim glass window. Then they stacked chairs atop and in front of the bookcases, but they appeared flimsy.

They were up and away before they had time to think further. Mike held him by the armpits, but Patch’s breathing grew erratic and his cries were worse for being muffled. They staggered. Her boots dislodged rocks that cartwheeled and got faster as they fell toward the greens of the canopy which blurred the valley below. It looked as if she’d kidnapped and bludgeoned him. Patch was oblivious to all this, his eyes were shut so tight they might have been sewn. All that was left was to hustle him away from the scene of the crime and into a shallow grave. Who needed the Taliban when she took such care of him?

This was a unique set in the history of The Other Band. Rather than the usual wrangling to get “his” songs in the set (and the requisite usual wrangling of the others for their songs), this set felt like the straightforward dictum of a divorce settlement. It was about fifteen songs long. There were five band members.

This is our Serbia. This
Is our Syria. This is our neo-
Nazi superiority. This
Is our Selma, our Watts, our Boston.