No. 22
"Everyone who is alive has a ghost inside them, don't they?" –Kelly Link's New Boyfriend; Jamel Brinkley's Lucky Man; fiction from Kathmandu by Prawin Adhikari; John Haskell remembers George Trow; Julia Cooke participates in the Parable Conference; new fiction by Garth Greenwell and Anna Noyes; poems by Maria d'Arezzo, Caroline Knox, Kevin Prufer, and others; and introducing Andrea Maturana.
Poetry
Out of Context
No. 22 • Deborah Pease
You must understand / My simple perception— / You know well you were living / Distant from life—Fiction
The New Boyfriend
No. 22 • Kelly Link
She puts two fingers on his lips. She takes a breath and holds it, like she’s about to jump off a bridge into very deep water. Well, she is.Fiction
Interiors
No. 22 • Andrea Maturana
While Villagrán waited on the other side of the curtain for her to get undressed, he began to hope that there was something truly unusual wrong.Fiction
Treelaw
No. 22 • Anna Noyes
“Doesn’t it feel like I don’t weigh a thing,” I said, and he said, “Feels like I’m holding nothing at all.”Fiction
A Lucky Man
No. 22 • Jamel Brinkley
With any two people one would get the brunt of it, and time had hit him worse than any beating he'd ever seen in the ring.Feature
A Man on the Grass
No. 22 • John Haskell
Their power is rooted not in their beauty but in the sense of inclusion they offer, a sense of inclusion that, for some people, isn’t as important as truth.Poetry
D’Arezzo: Two Poems
No. 22 • Maria d’Arezzo
It would not surprise me to find I am dead— / as my soul is full of sweet things / I never found in life.Poetry
Give Pause
No. 22 • Rae Armantrout
Before we knew / what pleasure meant / we were multiplying, / going forth / into surrounding space / until all space / was pain.Poetry
Difficult Evening
No. 22 • Caroline Knox
Their job is to write the placecards, so at the head of the table / they are putting Gilbert Osmond, and honorably on his right / they seat Margot Macomber.Poetry
[A Sounding at the Ear]
No. 22 • Lisa Lubasch
A sounding at the ear. And a ringing at the doorstep. Look, she said, a sounding at my hair, and a laughing in the footsteps.Poetry
Two Poems
No. 22 • Gëzim Hajdari
Ripped from the earth like weeds / we clutch at our names, / we do not know how / this loneliness has found us.Poetry
In the Mansion of Supersonic Dreams
No. 22 • Sarah Crossland
Tonight I stand under the shower’s blue stoplight / for nine hundred years. Tallying the centuries, / each number a chaser, surviving only until the next / pale digit takes its place.Poetry
Harbingers of the Deaths of Parrots
No. 22 • Krzysztof Jaworski
Perhaps the songs they sang for us / were not those we’d have wanted to hear, / but who among us can, with a clean conscience, / say of himself that what matters to him / is what others listen to.Poetry
Sundowning
No. 22 • William Brewer
An empty all-white room with drapeless windows / as winter spills its math across the sills / where nothing suffers, that’s where / there’s nothing left to misremember / or forget.Poetry
Assorted Fictions
No. 22 • Jessica Baran
Rigor is no longer involved. Peeling back / reveals two discrete compartments, adjoining.Poetry
Hahn: Two Poems
No. 22 • Kimiko Hahn
I am not gigantic and I don’t keep my head down—like / the now-extinct elephant bird.Poetry
Wild Spring
No. 22 • Wong May
Because we were young / our picnic / Was hard-boiled eggs & black coffee in a flask.Poetry
True Crime
No. 22 • Kevin Prufer
The half-plastered ladies in tennis whites / at the taped-off perimeter / whispered among themselves, how sad.Feature
The Art of Participation
No. 22 • Julia Cooke
To feel fully seen, period, is powerful; to feel seen by another person in something that calls itself a work of art is ever more so.Fiction
Mentor
No. 22 • Garth Greenwell
I remembered the certainty I had had, hours before, of my own competence, the pleasure I had taken in the solace I could give.Fiction
The Messiah
No. 22 • Prawin Adhikari
When someone much weaker than you confronts a brute much stronger than you and fights to the death in defense of an ideal, something gives inside: you become a bit of a coward.Order A Public Space
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