Essays – Vol. 1 Brooklyn

Roy

April 17, 2019 No Comments

Roy
by Nate Waggoner

When he was a boy, Roy Sullivan was out in the fields, hacking away at grain with a scythe. Picture a turn of the 20th century kid, maybe in overalls, sweating, buzz cut, diligent, serious. An expansive field lies in every direction around him. This grim tool in his hand, the tool of a psychopomp, the last tool you ever see. The way Death might show up with it one day and attack you crossing the street, or might wait around in your room with you for months, checking his phone. Little Roy cut and cut in the Southern sun, and the sun went away and clouds crept out, and a bolt of lightning struck his blade, bounced off it and sets the crops on fire.

Essays

My Father’s Face

April 3, 2019 No Comments

My Father’s Face
by Alex DiFrancesco

Olive skin.

*

I am scrolling mindlessly through Facebook when an article jumps out at me. In the accompanying picture, a woman has a thought bubble with nothing in it. The headline says the article is about people who cannot see pictures in their mind.

Essays

Chasing Uncle Park

March 21, 2019 No Comments

Chasing Uncle Park
by Jonathan Warner

He was a renaissance man of all things cool – bush pilot, motorcyclist, electric guitarist, pool shark, gymnast, mechanical genius, high-diver, general bad boy, and smooth ladies man – he even built a race car for Paul Newman. All the fantastic stories about him that seemed exaggerated were straight true, but that didn’t stop him from growing even more mythic in my young boy mind.

Essays, Lit.

Tell Me How Much You Love It

February 27, 2019 No Comments

Tell Me How Much You Love It
by N. Michelle AuBuchon

Your friends own an apartment in Park Slope a few blocks from your house. It’s modern and homey: plants on a terrace that faces a quiet street, all the pots and pans, a nice stove, and proper wine glasses.

They ask you to house sit for a week—water the plants, feed the cats. You live in a nice apartment with two other roommates, but it has never been a home. You are a cook, and you never cook there. The kitchen does not feel like yours. Your knives and cast iron gather dust. Your cookbooks sit on the shelf above the microwave—a reminder of your former life—when you knew how to prepare meals, take care of yourself, boil an egg, bake a cake, and roast a chicken every now and then. When you lived in Astoria, you taught yourself to cook. You read cookbooks and scoured every market in the neighborhood to make new recipes every night. Your favorites were the recipes that had ingredients you’d never tasted before—the whole experience a kind of adventure—a thrill.

Essays, Featured, Lit.

The Enchantments of Felicidad Blanc

February 26, 2019 No Comments

I first encountered Felicidad Blanc the same way most people before me had, hearing her melancholy, singsong voice say in Spanish: “He died at seven in the evening in Castrillo de las Piedras one summer afternoon, luminous and clear, like so many others we had lived in other summers. The previous days we had been happy. Once again a rupture interrupted my life.”

Essays

Cork

February 13, 2019 No Comments

Cork
by Emily Weitzman

The Long Valley Pub is the kind of typical, cozy, dimly lit Irish establishment that perpetually smells of Guinness. I climb up a tight stairwell to the tucked away bar that hosts Cork’s weekly poetry open-mic on my first evening in the city. I came to Ireland to escape—from what, I’m not so sure. I have a poetry grant, which provides me, a recent college graduate, with the freedom and money to travel the world solo for a year. Yet each new place I make home inevitably leaves me restless. My eighth time starting over in a new country this year, the feeling of the unfamiliar has become almost ordinary. I don’t have a clear sense of direction, yet I cannot stop moving. This is my last month of movement, this time in Ireland, before heading home. The decision to come here was almost an afterthought: a place so steeped in literary tradition, why not? As I order a pint and take a seat by myself in the packed room of Cork poets, Ireland seems more steeped in beer than anything else.

Essays

Fangs

January 30, 2019 No Comments

Fangs
by Tabitha Blankenbiller

The orthodontist asks me to bite and bite again. I grind on a slip of magic paper. A woman hovers behind him with a water pick and instrument tray, and knows what he requires before he asks. Together they file down a stray edge to my front tooth, the one I’ve paid hundreds of non-insured dollars to fix. I have spent the last 30 months with my mouth corralled by invisible fences, yanking my stray right incisor back in line with the friends it abandoned so long ago. In the commercials they tell you that Invisalign should only take you a year, but that’s because your teeth weren’t as fucked as mine.

Essays

Corrective

January 16, 2019 No Comments

Corrective
by Joshua James Amberson

In fourth grade, my aging teacher’s neat handwriting began to morph into a series of arcane, jumbled symbols, their formerly straight lines and perfect circles turning wavy and uneven. I wondered if Mr. Youngren was getting shaky as time went by, or if it was an issue with the chalk, or even the board itself. My confusion continued for weeks, maybe even months, unable to interpret the words in front of me and not understanding why.