There are some big changes going on behind the scenes at the Portland Review. Sadly, our wonderful and vibrant Prose Editor, Jyoti Roy, had to step down. It’s impossible to express the depth of gratitude she deserves. She tackled everything we threw at her with tireless passion and insight. Her energy and sense of humor will be missed in our dank sub-basement offices. While we…
Nabokov’s Notecards by Judith Skillman
French panes where you waken—the room smaller, the town foreign. The morning sun prismed, cutting through one house to wing another. The train whistle urgent, its butterflied cars snaking as if through tunnels inside other tunnels. The giftee can never thank the giftor. Protagonist outside— on leaving his prison-castle—blinks, dazed by the escape route through green-blue waters. You dream of counter-espionage, schisms. Is it autumn…
The Teenagers by Kaitlyn Burch
They started the day in Savannah, where Addie washed her face in the stained sink of a gas station restroom. They had slept in the car again, parked in the shared lot of a gas station and a Taco Bell. Addie staying awake long into the night listening to the cars on the near by freeway, their far away push and then a woosh like…
A Literary Whirlwind
Publishing is a cyclical process, especially at a micropress like the Portland Review. We read in submission cycles, use round robin voting to make our selections, take each piece we decide to print through one or more copyediting rounds, and rely on our social circles—both physical and digital—to get the word out. If you’re a regular visitor to our site, you’ll notice another new set…
Elegy for the Person Who Used to Write My Status Updates by Colin Pope
Sweet, cherubic boy who loved a woman SOOOOOO much it warranted the high praise of the exclamation point, the x’s and o’s, even an elated smiley as though this love, this identifier of secret property rights had itself created a new language of written punctuation— where has the steel falcon of your idealism wandered? All the world was yours to hate, yours to incite…