Category: Miscellaneous

Buenos Aires by Rose Hunter

colorful apartments in buenos aires

That morning I woke up with a heavy head. The air was thick with smoke and blaring TV filled the cramped hotel room. I’d woken up earlier and turned the TV off, but Jack had turned it back on. Then I’d turned the volume down, and he’d turned it back up.

Urns by Nicole Oquendo

arms of girl in sweater wrapped around an urn

There’s not much about my father that I actually know. What I think I know now is that he’s getting skinnier by the year and old enough to stop doing things as he used to. Until the last few years or so, my father, in his sixties, passed for forty to strangers.

1977 by Peter DeMarco

The bathroom of the 7-Up plant in the Bronx is an artist’s canvas for pornographic drawings. A giant penis, balls with hair, vaginas, large-lettered dirty language. A perverse form of hieroglyphics. This new, raw world is a wonderment, far away from green suburbia.

Depressive Episodes by Thomas DeMary

At the train station, Amber greeted me with bells on. Underneath a school-girl uniform, crotchless panties tinkled the chime of a lone brass bell. I spun her love atop my fingertip, dribbled between my knees and launched the fadeaway jumper. Returning from dinner, she asked, “How come you don’t hold my hand anymore?” I called her a bitch. The comparison of a lover to a female dog conjured a deeper truth.

My Mother, The Darwinist Shopper

In the catacombs of the Belz Factory Outlet Mall hung a pair of rayon Day-Glo orange shorts with a fat black elastic waistband, the missing piece to my patchwork fashion sense. My mother didn’t flinch when I pulled it off the steel carousel with “clearance” in starburst font on top.