Academia is awash with fifty dollar words that few can buy. Those terms, spoken in a certain style, presented in papers, at conferences, 4:30 lectures, were once music to my ears. Now all I hear is the caustic evasion of … Read More
We would meet in front of the Burger King in Piccadilly Circus to go to West End nightclubs during August of 2004, me and two Spanish sisters from my old residence hall who shared a love of dancing and cheap drinks.
Emma and Dani were sprawled out on the bed in Dani’s room snorting cocaine with a one hundred dollar bill and a small mirror that had once belonged to Dani’s pink jewelry box. The kind with the ballerina that you had to wind; when the box opened, the ballerina would twirl around and around to The Russian Dance from The Nutcracker. Bones protruded from Dani’s hip through her translucent skin, and her gaunt face sagged. Her piercing blue eyes were dulled by thick black eyeliner, and the heavy bronzing makeup coating her face obscured her wan teenage skin. Dani took a big hit and laid back on her simple white bed, sniffling loudly and pawing at her nose.
The last few bars of a big-band tune exposing themselves without a hint of self-awareness and the half-sober apercus of a gaggle of twenty or so be-sequined, be-suited women and men of a certain age their laughter playing soft on … Read More
Junior Travis Muir began writing his novel Thomasovitch, to be released in August by The American Book Press, shortly after arriving on campus freshman year
We need a number to plot our love, to propose a first THC, whiskey fake lust romp as love or it would be to us, also, the night a boy walked through a glass door like magic, with sound. When … Read More
“One afternoon, Dorothy Cochran—New Jerseyite, artist, septuagenarian, self-described pied piper—was walking through the Montclair Art Museum, where she has been teaching a printmaking class since 2010.”
On the seventieth anniversary of Ataturk’s death I was in the mountains between Van and Diyarbakir with a baby on my lap and her three year old brother stretched out on the seat behind me while their mother tried to sleep, the silk scarf slipping from her hair.
And what’s more there’d be too much to tell, with his folded-up face and our proximity, the fact that we’d lived so close to each other growing up, that in high school we’d mostly talk to the same girls and … Read More
I am on my balcony. I have been here for three days and two nights. It was my wife who put me here. It happened like this:
At dawn, when we wake, she wakes, I see: she, simulacrum of sweetie, presently bovine sweetie, clodhopper lovely, trundle fatly to her boudoir to assess the damage: six digits, the tally. These days, my girl: formidable haunches, breasts sapped of buoyancy, deflated balloon breasts, gobs of fatty skin where there ought only to be loveliness. She squirms into her negligee, once loose-fit, casual, today perilously taut, and thumps into the kitchen. When she walks her feet slap the floor.
