“I don’t understand anything about the ballet; all I know is that during the intervals the ballerinas stink like horses.” 

-- Anton Chekhov

“When I dance, the stage shakes with my weight.

The whitetail flit across the road,
tails raised in greeting or surrender,
a herd—a small stampede—crossing
this rural Iowa highway, emerging
from fields of green, leaping
the cable guard

Shane Jones’s Crystal Eaters begins as a countdown. The chapter numbers start at 40 and irregularly drop to zero by the book’s end. The page numbers recede against conventions too, and the

Betty crossed her yard and our street and my yard holding a bundle of mail.

This Moment at the Peticolas Brewing Company When Chris and I Thought That Becoming Brewers Was the Only Way to Find Meaning in Our Otherwise Meaningless Lives

It looked like it was

The Light Bulb

Man did not get the idea for the light bulb from those cartoons when someone gets an idea.

Robinson Crusoe

Robinson Crusoe’s last words were not

TRIDENT LISP

When tenderness runs out there is tenderness,
Jonathan says.  We hand-in-handed but days
ago to the hiss of ocean spray, the salutation
and valediction of the sea a frothing

It’s called The Panda Barn, where you can go and it’ll just be rows and rows of beds

Sean Kilpatrick: If you and I could be said to exist outside ye old literary camps, and I think our flags remain hygienic because I don’t leave the house and you’re too good at what you do, also

I snapped back into it at the bar. I’d been there the whole time, of course, but I hadn’t really acknowledged it, and I took in the room and the situation like crawling out of a ditch. Billy was

ZAZEN AT THIRTY-SIX

When I was twenty, Emily called me
from her dorm room. She wanted to know
if I believed in God, something about
trading an Iowa village population
three grand for a

The Day Shirley Temple Died

I remembered I was a bad mother. I called up my son, a bellboy in a fancy Las Vegas hotel, I wanted to apologize, patch things up. Redemption is a thing I believe

The next three and a half or four minutes will be used to draw conclusions on the relevance and authenticity of Christmas based on self reflexivity by using photographs of Cheryl Ann during the days leading up to Christmas. 

You know shit’s over when they flunk a nihilist out of the suckass pedagogy for bringing too much optimism.

Following his debut collection, Rabbit Punches (Low Fidelity Press, 2006), Neighbors of Nothing (Dzanc, 2013) marks Jason Ockert’s triumphant return to the press, offering ten distinctly original

Humans learn occlusion on their way out of infancy—the ability to grasp that the toy still exists when it’s under the blanket...

 We believed something together, and when we believed it, it was true. Nothing else more true.

 inhabited a square-foot ghetto in Austin, cute by standards of being raised south of 8 mile, upside Detroit’s unfair putty

I
     
i dedicate this poem
to the first 15 years
of the twenty first century.
it's name is "citrus".
i call it that
because I can't remember
its real name,
or anything else

That was the night Gabby and I drank the bottle of bourbon next to the makolet.
In America, we call them mini-marts, but in Israeli outskirts,
we call them makolets --
until we can’t form the

Jenny Offill is the author of Last Things, and most recently, Dept. of Speculation.  In the words of Michael Cunningham, “Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation resembles no book I’ve read before. If

It's Complicated

I could make a painting brighter
if I used brighter colors
It’s as simple as that

But it’s really not because
I don’t want to use brighter colors

And why I don’t