Sex Ed With Barbie and GI Joe

by Julie Britt

Originally published on July 13, 2011

“He ain’t no doll. I keep on telling you GI Joe ain’t no doll. I don’t play with dolls. That’d make me some kind of sissy, like you, always talking about kissing and reading and stuff.”

Gloria Mindock

interviewed by Derek Alger

Originally published on July 1, 2011

Gloria Mindock, author of the poetry collections, Blood Soaked Dresses (Ibbetson St. Press, 2007) and Nothing Divine Here (U Soku Stampa, 2010), is editor and publisher of Cervena Barva Press, and in 2007, became the editor of the Istanbul Literary Review, an online journal based in Turkey.

Sabbath Day Soft Serve

by Victoria Thompson

Originally published on July 1, 2011

Stirring a spoon in swoops between the letters of alphabet cereal, I watch my mother drop pills into her seven-day pill container. It’s a familiar sound— soft, but consistent and sometimes destructive, like the tick of water from a leaky pipe dripping into the steel soup pan that your mother told you to put beneath [...]

Ziggurat

by Sheila Thorne

Originally published on July 1, 2011

I look around at the solid glass wall, cathedral ceiling, Oriental rugs, squishy soft sofas, and wonder whether Enedina, who lives in this house eight hours a day, is under the impression that me and George live in similar surroundings. If she were to know what kind of place we really live in, would she ever consent to letting us have her baby?

Chemicals

by Melissa Holm

Originally published on July 1, 2011

$ 9.99 for a box of cherry bombshell hair color and grandma waits for the tick of my heels up the walk with fuzzy moss growing in the cracks, demands I turn up the radio, before the slam of the door. It’s her hunger for a constant drowning of ordinary sounds, the rasping dishwasher, the [...]

You are Mayor Koch!

by Derek Alger

Originally published on July 1, 2011

The adrenaline and exhilaration of declaring freedom from a situation perceived as oppressive was soon replaced by increasing panic when I realized I would no longer be getting a paycheck.

Burglary

by Mary Jones

Originally published on July 1, 2011

She went back to the bedroom where the man was still in the bed. She told him she was ready to go now, and then she folded him up neatly and put him into the bag too.

Africa, By Now

by Jesse Czelusta

Originally published on July 1, 2011

Had she no memory of machetes and warlords, of petty thieves with missing arms, Rhoda would not have understood the meaning of the question, “Short sleeves or long sleeves?”

Post-Modern Hijinx

reviewed by Richard Holinger

Originally published on July 1, 2011

Sloth. Mark Goldblatt. Greenpoint Press, 2010. $16.00. 173 pp.