— One day far offshore I asked the best deckhand I had how he got to be so good. He said, many years ago his father left two boys in the Alaskan wilderness with nothing to eat except a box of Bisquick and a baited crab ring. Many nights those boys waited listening for footsteps that never came. They ate a lot of Bisquick,…
Call for Submissions
Oyez! Oyez! Oyez! The Portland Review is seeking submissions for its Fall Film & Video issue! We’re looking for anything from fiction to poetry to essay to whatever, but (in my opinion) the most exciting way to submit is to write AN ELOQUENT DEFENSE OF A MOVIE EVERYONE ELSE HATES FOR SOME REASON. We need lots of these! Defenses of Nic Cage movies! Defenses of…
Of Aquanauts
— Submersibles tethered: strangers to see into the silence the hidden coelacanth suspended in the womb. They sing in high-pitched Doppler to glint its scales; when nothing sings back, Calypso’s monitors are black (black is the sound of nothing there). On the screen you are crosshatched— mysterious like an echo: an obscure, half-told fable forged by the clatter of hammer banging anvil: my Hephaestus,…
Questions and Answers
— Yesterday my five-year old daughter chased her brother with a spatula. I’ll kill you! she screamed. Where does she get that? From the perverts on television. We don’t have a television. Then from her mother and father bickering. I’ve been a single parent since she was born. Then it’s the school, you know what it’s like. But she’s home-schooled. Then it’s the isolation….
White Heat
— My mother stands before the white heat, but for her it is more Cagney than Dickinson, sweat pants and a tray of pills, cable, that good son on a tower of fuel calling out to his ma. I’m all undercover, unanointed, Edmund O’Brien working his prison con. For her part, she can recall the exact evening in 1949 when she first saw the…