Articles

Our train broke down in the frozen heart of the taiga. At first we were startled. We had grown accustomed to the relentless presence of the engine, the way that it throbbed beneath our toes and thrummed through our veins. When we tried to rise, we stumbled and then tried again. How strange it was …

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If the mind is one of those Piranesi prisons, she said, full of darkly nested architectural redundancies—as we know the human brain is, with its neurons like ropes slung precariously from cell to cell, and interrupted spiral staircases going neither up nor down, and ruined stone lions hinting at some tapestried past when all this …

Begin with knowing the comma is a word and the word is always fuckin’. Forget the gerund, then torque the lazy u into an a, and let the vowel kneel into the roof of your mouth like a penitent against a church pew. Stretch the c into the k, graceful as Astaire in blackface. Now …

  See more poems from Issue 15.2 by purchasing a copy in our online store. Digital copies only $5.

  See more poems from Issue 15.2 by purchasing a copy in our online store. Digital copies only $5.

  See more poems from Issue 15.2 by purchasing a copy in our online store. Digital copies only $5.

Rita came home from the war. The town was not as if she had never left. Some things had changed. The Taco Bell, for instance, was closed, but another had opened on the next street. The Church of the Passionate Blood, with its stained-glass Christ as slim and pale and sweet as a glowworm, had …

(From the series How to Celebrate National Days: Instructions for Enjoying Pseudoholidays) June 1, 2018 Think back to when you were a kid and you’d give the classroom globe a spin, stop it with your fingertip, and vow to move to whatever location you landed on. Recall how sometimes you’d hit the ocean and have …

In the Silk City, seventeen-year-old Jennie Bosschieter makes ribbons inside a factory. Men work the vats of the neighboring dye houses, coloring so many miles of silk thread that they could connect Paterson, New Jersey, to the Netherlands, the country where Jennie was born, thousands of times and still leave enough to spare for the …