Gabo Prize Winner
Five Poems by Murilo Mendes
translated by Baz Martin Gibbons
Despite his popularity in Brazil and his immigration to Europe, Murilo Mendes has never found an English translator. His poetry has long been known in France, partly due to Mendes’ friendship with notable figures of the French avant-garde such as André Breton, Francis Picabia, Eugene Ionesco, as well as Nobel laureate, Albert Camus. But in the English-speaking world Murilo Mendes’ poetry is virtually unknown. The five poems translated here appear in English for the very first time. […]
Writing for Young People
Pacific Grays and Blues
by Zoë Mertz
The beach is cold. Sierra’s never been on a beach that’s cold before. Back in Malibu, the only type of weather was beach weather: balmy skies, just enough salt on the breeze, and sunshine that kept her naturally pale skin tan year-round. This beach is most definitely not Malibu. Scruffy pines line the crumbling cliff faces, and everywhere she looks is gray: gray sand, gray sky, gray sea. Sierra had to whack her way through moss snaking down from bare branches and crush half a foot of limp brown leaves beneath her too-big boots before she could even set foot on the craggy terrain that passed for a seashore here. No white sands or palm trees in sight. […]
Diana Woods Prize Winner
Here’s to the Breed of Flying Hens!
by Frances Ogamba
When my toddler son says the word “mum,” it is not me he looks at. While his voice enunciates the first letter with a clipped edge, he points instead at a trumpet-shaped hibiscus we always pluck from the flower tree tipping across the fence delineating his older brother’s school. […]
Fiction
What’s Left Beneath When All the Wishes Have Blown Away
by Diane D. Gillette
Kara is 14 and over breakfast, Cousin Martha comes up, how she got herself in trouble running around with boys.
“No one’s going to buy the cow if you’re giving the milk away for free,” Kara’s dad tells her, not for the first time, or last.
Poetry
Occupation Experiments
Joy Arbor
Is t
his a b
it of w
hat it means to be occu
pied? Beauty elsewhere.
Lunch Special
Manifesting Social Change: An Interview with Kavita Das
interviewed by Rochelle Newman-Carrasco
The cover art for Craft and Conscience: How to Write About Social Issues centers the book’s primary identity as an actionable craft intensive. Surrounding the title are the names of fifteen renowned authors because, as the reader soon discovers, Kavita Das has also curated an anthology—a diverse collection that places the work of social justice visionaries into conversation with her own socially conscious work and insights. […]
Flash Prose
The Deserters
by Kyrié Eleison
We packed an ice chest and drove from civilization to a grave. We drove forty-five minutes to a sea in the middle of the desert. You said the Salton Sea was a mistake—an engineering failure that caused the Colorado River to flood the Imperial Valley in 1905. But the mistake seemed a blessing in disguise. Interest in the desert oasis grew.[…]
Interview
How to be in the World: An Interview with Allison Cobb
interviewed by Ashlee Laielli
Allison Cobb is the author of Green-Wood, After We All Died, Born2, and Plastic: An Autobiography, winner of the Oregon Book Award and the Firecracker Award. Cobb’s work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Denver Quarterly, and Colorado Review, among other journals. She has been a resident artist at Djerassi and Playa and received fellowships from the Oregon Arts Commission, the Regional Arts and Culture Council, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. […]
