Prose, Poetry, and Art since 1956
There is probably something distinctly strange about the era that we live in, and Benjamin Kessler knows this. In Of This World, Kessler’s new, debut collection of short stories, reality (as we have come to know it) plays out with the specter of fantasy trailing closely behind. Characters come and go, but one thing remains the same throughout: they live in a version of our…
Where I live, abandoned buildings lean precariously towards roads carved by oxen the first time they sloughed this forest to the ground. The only road to my home is held in place by roots of dead trees, with a drop so sharp that you are looking at the middle of redwoods while you drive. Neighborless houses have become markers of our town, which is not…
To cleanse a home of bad smells, those old burn pits from decades ago; bring to the earth and our hands large gusts of rich white billows; welcome guests, let it travel through their hair and fingers as we pass around the burner small waves of heat on our skin; expelling bad spirits on Friday mornings as my mother in a prayer garment carries the…
Under the bad neon hardware store lighting in brunch and boutique Ranelagh I flap a six-tint color swatch at my med school classmate. As if a ticket on a commuter train, nudging to get hole-punched by the conductor’s signature stencil, irregular slashes like a hasty wolf attack. “Liquid skin: cannot be unseen,” Molly warns me off slathering my bedroom in peach paint. Her ex-roommate did…
Essie’s got hair like a dried dandelion. So blonde it’s almost gray, all scraggly thin and light looking. So short you can see right through to her scalp. Sitting in the desk behind her, I like to imagine I’m blowing on the top of her head. I pretend I’m watching the little pieces of hair scatter in a thousand different directions—hair floating up to the…