Prose, Poetry, and Art since 1956
My wife’s hometown of Woodview, Pennsylvania lies an hour west of Centralia, a place we pass on the drive in from John F. Kennedy Airport. “It’s been on fire for over sixty years,” Amber explains. “Centralia is basically abandoned now…there are only five or six people left who refuse to leave. My parents used to tell me about it growing up.” I glance over at…
I. I hear a change in their breathing and I do not look around but keep my eyes on the screen upon which the opera Le Nozze di Figaro plays, Marianne Crebassa as Cherubino singing Cherubino’s most beautiful aria, Voi Che Sapete, which, in the world of the opera, he has composed himself: a little song for the Countess, one of the many women with…
We bought a television, Gabe and I, a few days ago. It’s the first TV we’ve owned as a couple, a shocking and disturbing development. When we moved in together six months ago, it was under the assumption that we would never buy one. We considered ourselves above the people who spent an entire Sunday binging Netflix on their 70-inch plasma screens. Not that we…
Portland Review is now open for submissions in Poetry, Fiction, and Nonfiction. The window for submission will be open from September, 27th to October 20, 2023. We will close the submission for the genre if we reach our cap before the official closing date. At Portland Review, we are looking for submissions (stories, poems, genre hybrids) that are willing to push boundaries and subvert traditional…
Pearl— The first time I saw the heifer was the morning Clarke brought me back from Lexington in early June. She was out front, chewing on crabgrass around the porch. I thought, first, that must be unpleasant. Certain she was getting some of that milky gray gravel laid around the house between her teeth, my own jaw aching with every crunch. And oh, I could…