An excerpt… My mother made love to her mirror, twice a day, morning and evening, every day of her life. Before bedtime, this involved the soft, slow strokes of her fingertips across her face and neck, always caressing upwards in a circular motion that stimulated the nerves and capillaries. “Gravity is a thing to fight,” she said. “Early and without mercy.” My mother attacked aging…
Winter 2013 Call For Submissions
Attention Poets! Artists! Writers! Portland Review is now reading for our Winter 2013 issue. This issue will focus primarily on poetry, artwork, flash-fiction, and flash nonfiction fitting the theme of “honoring the past.” This will be our feature issue for both poetry and artwork. We’re hoping to additionally run a series of broadsides showcasing some of this work. While the central focus of the issue…
How to Kiss Upside Down
“A professor told me not to use that letter / as the subject of a poem. // I don’t remember her name.” This complete poem, entitled “I,” is a snide argument for the insistent confessionalism that goes on in much of Poetic Scientifica, a confessionalism that is unwavering and brimming with warped comedy. Out this year from University of Hell Press, Leah Noble Davidson’s first book is a bold declaration on the capacities of humor and raw storytelling as means for emotional resilience.
Nebulous Light
The day my mother died I learned that the commonest noun in the English language is time. That morning I sat alone by her bed, stroking her forehead as her eyes fluttered open and closed and the night made its slow transition into nebulous light. As I touched her skin, then her hair, I said all the things a son says to a dying mother,…
A Lesson on the Road
An excerpt… Puerto Vallarta is one of those glad and gamboling Mexican beach towns where everybody’s always stopping you to ask whether you’re married or not. Considering the substantial number of newly wedded Norteamericanos who come to sunburn themselves along Vallarta’s fabled shores, it’s a bit of a softball question – a way to crack the intercultural code and to start a conversation about what…