Prose, Poetry, and Art since 1956
The jar looks to be full of swamp water. Its contents swirl and leave grit on the glass when you turn it over in your hands. “Duck blood soup,” explains your mother. “Czernina.” It always makes her sound even more Michigan, you think. She says it like chy-NEE-nah, which looks like “China” plus one syllable in your head, and sounds like CHAI tea, a woman…
The first time I saw Laura Patterson’s guts was 6 years ago. We had just met, sophomore year of high school, when she sat down next to me in the library. We chatted for a few minutes. She was a new sophomore, quite eager to talk to me. I assumed she was like this with everyone, looking for new friends. But I was too, so…
I’d like my spinach to manifest childcare. Dan wants it to offer legal advice. Martha wants the spinach to fold her laundry, wash her dishes, and maybe clean the bathroom? Jennifer just wants the spinach to write a goddamn poem. But the scientists that make the spinach better—into the Superfood we know it as today—just teach the spinach to send emails. “What bullshit,” says Dan….
/ˈɑːf.tər/ Preposition Alice met her father for the first time after her school recital. Her hands were so sweaty they slipped on the keys a couple of times and despite the encouragement from the audience, she knew she’d botched it. Her mother was waiting behind the scenes, flanked by a tall, lanky man. Years later, supine on the white leather sofa of a Freudian analyst,…
Our sixty-fifth year of publishing, and our second year of Portland Review’s online-only format began with the usual questions — where would we be taking the Review this year? Or, more interestingly, where might our authors take us? To answer these questions, we posed one of our own: Truth, or Dare? We received the truth of a compartmentalized self in Ana Maria Caballero’s “Room”; of…