Fiction

Krupov’s Gym

by Laura Hulthen Thomas

After Krupov secured his first dishonest contract, a gymnasium renovation and technology upgrades to Tverkassa’s only K–8 school, he vowed to scrub the corrupt job clean, but the project had been jinxed from the moment he’d bribed two old-guard cronies on the city council to give him the job. When a strike at the factory held up the oak flooring’s delivery, he’d had to fly to Volgograd and swallow the mark-up on a new order. He’d had to use outside labor to rip out defective ceiling joists when the carpenters who controlled every job in town refused to correct the shoddy work. Then, the shatter-proof glass for the new gym’s double-height windows smashed when the delivery truck overturned on a hairpin curve through the Caucasus. Krupov had to bribe a supplier in Rostov to rush a new special order. The job simply couldn’t get any worse.

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Nonfiction

Going Places

by Hayan Charara

On the morning of September 11, 2001, from the shoreline of the Jersey City neighborhood I lived in, I watched the World Trade Center buildings collapse and engulf the streets below in billowing clouds of debris.

“My student Mohammed noticed, while the two men approached him, that others in the observatory were staring. Soon the two men moved closer. They told him to get up and come with them. When he refused, they flashed badges.”

I was scheduled to teach my first class that day as a full-time faculty member at a college in Queens. I’d been living in New York City for seven years, and I had only visited the World Trade Center once, and only the ground floor, to buy discounted tickets to a Broadway show. I never made it to the observatory deck of what was once the world’s tallest man-made structure. A few weeks after the start of the semester I admitted this to my students, most of whom were lifelong New Yorkers.

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Poetry

I Abandon Poetry Altogether

by Amy Newlove Schroeder

At the party the body of the young
man makes me look

             I look

The lean uninflected flesh of the belly
This casual skin

Men looked
Now I look

The boy dives in the water,
then otters back, smiling at me

He doesn’t know that bodies
can empty like jars

He doesn’t know that I am
pine-harrowed, incomplete

Doesn’t know that I taste of quinine
and dandelion greens

Fiction

The Associated Virgins

by Rosalie Morales Kearns

The Incident, as we’ll call it, gave Elihu Wingate a few weeks of notoriety among his fellow psychologists. We know it’s hard to imagine, a gentle soul like Elihu Wingate the object of gossip up and down the West Coast.

“You’ve seen articles like this, in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s. The reporters follow the same arc: Ordinary Life Builds Up to Dramatic Incident. The incident isn’t described right away. The article hints at it, works up to it, maybe opens with a vignette of an ordinary day in the subject’s life, before everything changes.”

Try to throw a colleague off a cliff, and this is what happens.

Of course, we exaggerate. Gossip is always more colorful than truth, though the real version of events also contains a cliff-like structure, and the two men scuffling at the edge of it. We’ll get to that later.

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Nonfiction

Breaking the Distance

by Aimee Valentine

An illustrated interview with an Israeli writer living in the U.S.

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Poetry

With the Boy, in the House

by Jennifer Kronovet

The boy will raise a hand to salute you: a resistor
in the electrical system of ideas. Then the feeling
alarm. Then, Formica daytime again.

I feed him while concentrating on the words
I feed him. (If I list them, we might fail.)
Then tongue to floor tongue to plastic

tongue to grit. We detect no faults
with the juices of the house. I am modern.
This isn’t speaking. This is happening.

The creation of composite material. All action
greeted with unknowing. We are making
each day as if a day is not a real thing.