Prose, Poetry, and Art since 1956
Keening nuns turn to boreal fiends on their tidal island, filing through blind arcades fighting nor’easters. Heading chapel wise their habits keep their foreheads cozy. But the altar has gone green. The girls drop their coarse cut cloth and get low, to prostrate. Lithe moss virgins, their green bodies light up the damp stone. A ring of thorns has sprung up suddenly outside—proper protection for…
Before the State had built the dam and Mother River wet the ochre earth with her reckless kiss, our villages converged here like veins meeting at the heart or rice-grains gathering in the gut. My friends and I would play, our noodle-arms hung off the tamarind trees. Our parents sat out on patterned mats, their bright sandals strewn out to dry. The smells, the sounds,…
The rush I used to get from a good game of House is the same cozy urge adults feel when surveying a fictional landscape, projecting themselves into the zombie apocalypse or Earthsea or the strange rhythms of Regency suppers and seasons in London.
Portland Review is thrilled to announce Sara Duff as the winner of our inaugural Verna Marion Nugent Chapbook Contest. Her short story, “Perfect Specimens” was chosen by author Porochista Khakpour. The award supports emerging writers who have not yet published a book or had work appear major print or online outlets. Named after Portland-based librarian, single-mother, and short story writer Verna Marion Nugent, the contest is made possible…
Portland Review welcomes submissions of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, translation, and mixed-genre works for online publication. We are specifically looking for works that creatively interrogate the theme of borders. We’d hope to find work that explores borders, not as structures that operate as visible barriers, but those less seen: the lines between parent, child, and self; appetites and offerings; gender, bodies, and expectation; the subconscious, reality…