At first puzzlement, then joy. My baby in the making—surely my last—would, like a ferry heading for a wharf,know what to do along the way. The multiplying cells, the chemistryof contentment spreading through my blood: I was as ready for her birthas I

Star of a gnathic nightmare, boasting narrowsnout and jutting lower jaw, scissorteeth and scaled cheeks, a chain pickerel,in a serpentine weave, parts a clusterof weeds, spies a fellow benthic dweller,a molting crustacean, toboggan downto the verdant

Rosemary looked over the party; her parents and her parents’ friends down below on the sod lawn. Seersucker and espadrilles; white cotton dresses; Brazilian jazz; the costumes of their heyday. They drank beer and Long Island iced tea and white wine p

THE MURDER I COMMITTED—it wasn’t simply the strike of a dagger, at night, on the fifth of October, in a brightly lit living room. The murder I committed is a phenomenon of duration, akin more to slow poisoning than a flashing blade. I dare to hope th

finally the hour has comeit is time for the long journeyI say to my wife and child a last farewell and click the blue buttonmy face appears across from my faceit is the day we will virtually discuss the unpredictable resolutions I am sureobscurely wi

after Baudelaire’s “Je n’ai pas oublié” i.m. Jim Quinn, 1935–2020 I have not forgotten, neighbor,our red brick rowhouse, tiny and quietwith the window always cracked openeven in winter, and us rolling togetherinto the middle of the dented mattress,a

to say yes. I believed as a child.Meaning I feared. Or I loved.Or stood in the sun braced for thosestupid photos—Easter, Christmas, Fourth of July. Redact, redact, erase, cross out, tear it up,let the wind take it. And windshowers down embers. That’s

Here I am I’ve been watching the animalsI watch them in the afternoonthat seems to drop my being lower into time bullfrogs singing from the long grasseshorses captured in a videoWild is a horse’s word They are running wild on an island & turning shar

And so it goes, God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was formless and empty; and on its deep face was darkness. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light, and there was light. And God sa

I murdered my least defensible vices,stacking them like bodiesin the surf. An armada of nurses rode into cherish the dead: Try harder, littlemoons, they said to the corpses, spooningeggplant into each mouth. Winterfollowed winter. Horses coughedblood

Three guys in fluorescent vests are taking downa tree along my neighbor’s fence line, which is, of course, my fence line, with my two round-eyed snakes and my wandering raccoon. That is, if you go in for ownership. My, my, my.For weeks the tree they’

A man in a mask and wearing a fat tank on his back is bent to the door of the parking garage.He is spraying and wiping, wiping and spraying. Another man with no mask and no hair shuffle-dances around him,gives a wave, crosses the street, tries to ope

Long ago cloisters had the sacred Truthof Holy Scripture painted on their walls.These pictures warmed the hearts of men of faithand eased the chill inside their stringent cells. Back when the Word of Christ was prosperous,more than one famous monk, u

Young gray cat puddled under the boxwood,Only the eyes alert. Appressed to dirt. That hissThe hiss of the grasses hissing What shouldWhat should. Blank road shimmers. On days like this,My mind, you hardlySeem to be.On days like these. No, no. See tha

As soon as Heidi arrived at Kim’s condo, she suggested they go meet LisaParsonsTwo, Kim’s online crush. Usually Kim was the rule-breaker, the wild girl whose mom let her do whatever she wanted, but Heidi hadn’t been able to stop thinking about LisaPa

On the evening of the accident Ganesan was on a bus from the office in Fort, heading in the direction of the National Cancer Institute in Maharagama. The bus was making its way in starts and stops, accelerating and braking as the driver tried, ruthle

Tremor in his hands. He turns obsoleteleaves edged with thunder since the opening scene.What he sees he reads under croton shade,out in the sun. Restless peninsula,dog-eared, melting off into the blue.The blue breaks white as hallucination,more hagga

Tennis is not the only sport with skew angles. Pool has skew angles and spin and backspin. But pool is murk, pool is cramped in the dark. Soccer has geometry and passing shots, but teams, not individual players like tennis. Soccer has sun, like tenni

Selim the half-wit hoarded everything—that was the story they told me my first day in waste management. Selim had lost his wife, and I guess everyone figured he took up hoarding as a way to fill the void. It started out with stuff his wife might have

KAVEH AKBAR is the author of Calling a Wolf a Wolf, the editor of The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse, and the poetry editor for The Nation. His second collection, Pilgrim Bell, will be published by Graywolf this summer. HASAN ALTAF is the managing e

Sunset in the valley,which is still sometime away from “official sunset,”this inland of an earlier nautical twilight;but at the fastigium of the dead central limbof a York gum at the southwest cornerof the red shed, a red-capped parrothighlights—or i

Penicillin was discovered in a moldy petri dishin 1928 and by the forties was called a miracle drugand by the fifties had become both widely availableand cheap, which is to say that penicillin arrivedin time for me, who without it would have dieda ch

Editor Emily Nemens Managing Editor Hasan Altaf Assistant Online Editor Brian Ransom Assistant Editor Lauren Kane Poetry Editor Vijay Seshadri Art Editor Charlotte Strick Southern Editor John Jeremiah Sullivan London Editor Adam Thirlwell Paris Edito

Elena, his sister, was going to stay with him all August. Maybe it would bleed into September a little, she warned, and Andrés said that was fine. What else could he say? The house in Almería was as much hers as it was his, on paper—they’d inherited

1. There’s a sign near the waterfrontI think it’s advertising cheer:says 400 YEARS, VIRGINIA SPIRITS. A swig. A year ago last night, my dead crowd mean even ceremonyof Jamestown, at the schooner that brought those first here.They think: long tripdid

Foreskin. A default setting. midnight. Dry eyes. Hesitation at an intersection. Premature adulthood. sheets. Freelancing. Yes maybe. knuckles. Hypervigilance. Corn stubs A sucked-in stomach. Syncing. Infantile embroidery. Showtime. The next step. Pri