I dreamt there was a fire in the study and I tried to put it out and she called me a fool saying save the fire and save the books; the child. We take up our quarrel with the idea that birth is some elegy sung to the page— (scenario in which there’s something in your hands as you run from the burning apartment. You…
Last Call by Kirsten Holt
For Michael Pandel In a pub toasting your too-late birthday, I imagine your eyes purpled and shut, unlike plums but yielding, spoiling into the hard ground of your cheekbones the rise and fall of the respirator, not your chest, the Morse code that divided your breaths; shortshort shortshort clicking like a spent film reel, and you swerving off the screen. A month later you stir…
The Stubborn Child by Gwyn Ruddell Lewis
We told our children he hadn’t listened to his mother. We said he played Chicken. With a train. His mother had told him to stay away from the tracks. The train braked, much too late. We told our children he was a boy although he was closer to a man. We said Chicken when we knew it was no such thing. Our children kept away…
FATHERS OF THE UNIVERSE by Megan Freshley
As a little boy in Perrysburg, Ohio, he takes a shit on the marble steps of the methodist church while his father preaches a sermon inside. It must be impossible for my father to tell apart his father and The Father as he crouches down. It is the fifties so his shorts are fifties shorts. Because it is the fifties, the church is across the…
Spring 2013 Launch Party, This Sunday!
We are excited to share the wonderful prose, poetry and art in Portland Review: Spring 2013 with you, so please join us this Sunday, May 12, to celebrate! We’ll gather at the beautiful and mind-bending Afru Gallery* (534 SE Oak, Portland, OR) from 3:30 to 5:30. There, we’ll mix, mingle, and welcome April Ehrlich, Erin Fox Ocón, Susan V. Meyers, and Willa Schneberg to the readers’ stage. We know…