Basile. Perrault. The Grimm boys, with their heavy sideburns. The author is irrelevant: in every version, it is all about her. The fairy, owl-eyed, did not have the heart to…
There is the story of the boy who awoke one morning to discover on his stomach a viral sprouting of tiny televisions. The story of the Benevolent Jubilance, who before…
You first see him through your patio window. Had you not been staring into the street, watching the minivans and compact cars zip past, gazing for minute after minute, you…
Sharks are resistant to cancer the way you are to hot water. I remember our first shower—your hands low on my waist, the drag of your mouth across my shoulders,…
She tries writing him poetry, but he doesn’t read poetry. She tries painting him, but she paints the soul rather than the face, and he can’t recognize himself. She tries…
Angela’s eye was magic. I say magic, though I could call it lazy. It did I admit, tend to wander. But never lazy, the way a pickled egg lazes or…
“Damosel, said Arthur, what sword is that, that yonder the arm holdeth above the water? I would it were mine, for I have no sword. Sir Arthur, king, said the…
“Poems eat people, like people eat poems,” she whispered through the stacks. I was pretending to be a librarian, but I was really on the run. “Do I know you?”…
–M. Robert-Houdin, 1843 My addled thumbs useless now for clockwork, I dream her in the air: bridal lilacs, our birdsong spring, how she’d call to me, teasing, from the back-shop…
In the chill blanketing the barn horses shiver like rubber- booted fathers at the door who softly cursing stamp their feet and neigh of green fields. Mark Jackley Mark…