Tag: literary magazine

“Death of a Goat” in Whirlwind Magazine’s Paralysis issue

The Death of a Goat

            “My brother was killed like a goat,” Boi said, leaning up against the crumbling concrete wall of the old campsite.

“What?” I said.

“That’s why I didn’t watch when they killed the goat today. My brother was killed like a goat.”

“That’s awful, Boi. I’m so sorry.”

I leaned against the wall next to him, my mind racing with doubts—about if I could begin to understand his situation, if I could appropriately respond, and then, just as quickly, if Boi was telling the truth, if his brother really was beheaded with a knife.

I had not noticed that Boi hadn’t watched the slaughter of the goat with the rest of us that day. Yet he felt as if he should explain himself, as if the absence of his presence was abnormal and required justification.

“Did you watch?” He asked me inquisitively, but with no judgment behind the question.

 

Read the rest of the story at Whirlwind Magazine.

 

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“Bastille Day, Philadelphia” published in Painted Bride Quarterly

“Lips and your beard and dark doorways
and the sense that I didn’t quite understand how the stars hung that way,
or the way we’d partied and drank Coronas
at a prison where men had languished and died in
feverish, dreamless solitude,
where they had locked up Al Capone until
time slipped on and on enough,
and suddenly we were drunk and shouting “Vive la France,”
eating cake a woman tossed to us from a mossy stone tower
in a pink Victorian dress.”

Read the full poem online in Painted Bride Quarterly.

 

“Old Story” poem published in Eunoia Review

“…Just the feeling, in the suburbs, over coffee, over pavement,
that I didn’t know him at all,
and that I would cease to exist if I left him now.
Just the same old banal love story,
older than Europe and concrete and cuneiform,
that makes every country song a prophecy.”

Read the full poem at Eunoia Review.

Philly’s Literary Vending Machines

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Maybe you thought the only thing you could get out of a vending machine was stale prewrapped cake, a bag of Frito-Lays and a feeling of regret. Try a book instead.

The New Yorker just featured a story on “the world’s first short-story vending machines” in France, but in Philly we’ve had them for years. Nic Esposito and Philadelphia nonprofit book publisher The Head & The Hand launched the literature vending machines in 2014 at Elixr Coffee in Rittenhouse Square with rotations around the city, and they’re back March 17.

Read full article here.