My boyfriend hit me in the face with a book. It was an accident, his hitting me. He only meant to hand me the book. He meant to hand the book back to me. But my face was in its path, he said.

The twelve stories in Susan Steinberg’s stunning third book, Spectacle, limn the desperate, neon-lit reality we’re forced to confront when we wake up from the American dream. They make me want to

The clinical term for what happened was a myocardial rupture, which basically means her heart exploded under the stress of her living. I got the call while I was taking a Latin quiz, and I'll

Except for the first single-celled organism
preposterously long ago, firecracker snapped
from a vast nothing, the earth is mulch & rot.

A comic about a yak, that may or may not be an anarchist, in a world that is huge and/or the yak may be incredibly tiny.

Maria say she gon' tell me the future. She say she know. Mama taught her, but Maria had that gift, not her mama. The real kind. She'd seen all kinds of things 'fore they happen, like her brother shot dead in that parking lot, she'd seen it all four days before it happened.

What you gon' tell me I don't already know? I say.

“We’re playing Memory Palace. It’s a medieval memory technique. If you need to remember a list of things, you pick a place that you remember well, like your childhood home or your office or your apartment, and you make a narrative...

If I were a room,
I would be transparent.

If it hadn’t been for my day job, I never would have gone to Steve’s Shoes. I was a personal assistant to a famous actor’s wife, which meant I did the errands she didn’t want to be bothered with.

Just in time for the opening bell (or is it more approrpriately an opening toast) of AWP in Boston tomorrow, we present Daniel Torday's "A&W&P." We first ran this story before AWP last

There were wolves near there. Wolves killing sheep. Poetry is dead. He thought. He could lend a hand.

Kathryn was doing all she could to get her son to touch his food again. She wanted him to eat. “I don’t know what to do,” she said to the doctor. “I don’t know what’s wrong.” The pitch of her voice

Happy Birthday   

You push your bike
on the worn pathway
into the bushes.
You enter my apartment
with chocolate cake
and colorful birthday hats. 
You put one on my head
and

You wake up to the sound of someone smashing white rocks outside your window. Only it's not rocks. You're just in a city made entirely of bones.

I read for the same reason that I fish. So I can feel what I can’t see.

A panel of grandfathers lived in the girl like a Greek chorus. One day she woke and they were building themselves bleachers. After that they didn’t do anything. Tired, they complained. They shouted

Self-portrait as fogged up car. / Self-portrait as Home Depot // parking lot at 3 AM, no cars, / no people. Self-portrait with // grocery cart with someone else’s / left behind list.

The Platonic Man cries whenever I cry. Tears will be streaming down my face and I’ll look up and he’ll be dabbing his eyes with a cloth napkin. 

"I know why you cry,” I say at the Cuban

She said, during the commercial break, that she was a fan of westerns. I said, I loved the train heist trope. She told me that we were going to wait on dinner, or that we should order in. I said, I

"Thought of you and our conversations this morning when I read David Shields' Riff column in the NYT Magazine. I get the sense that you're not particularly engaged with him one way or

Hello, readers. This is the first of two interviews with writer Ron Currie Jr. on the occasion of the publication of his new—and positively badass—novel Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles. Why two

I can take just about anything now.

Like how I returned from Christmas vacation to an inch of melted snow and a gaping hole above where I pee. Lake Effect, my landlord said, simply, squinting

Looking for the right angle

He poo-poo’s my relationship to nature, even when I tell him about touching the dead goat.

*

An intimacy that can hold the world?
An intimacy that

It’s the new plan, Shooter.  Poetry for broken systems.  Insurance rider attached. 

To London With Love

Artist: Wilhelm Blech
Album: Musicus Miscellanous; Christian Dean & Musica Immunda
Label: DNS

I am always looking outside myself for traces of the person I

Five years ago I took some pills hoping to lose the perpetual 10-15 pounds that I would always like to lose. Today I’m in Denver because those pills turned out to be sugar pills, and the FDA had a