Issue 10: Idols & Idolatry

An Aztec emperor’s chambers and the dreary quarters of a worker made ancient by his windowless office: two poems and two universes by Marshall Mallicoat.

At the outset of B.H. James’s “Dale,” we’re in a religious cult whose god is the original Karate Kid film. By the end, we’re in a memoir of marriage counseling, writing, and narrative structure.

In Shani Eichler’s debut story, “The Ties That Bind Us,” a secular Jewish family goes through an identity crisis when their daughter announces her engagement to a non-Jewish young man.

From his recent collections The Sailor and Turncoats of Paradise, Joobin Bekhrad’s six poems are written in a classical style steeped in Iranian mythology.

Dana Schein’s four paintings span from the spontaneity of artistic creation to pressure and melancholic boredom. One image depicts a student excelling in a piano lesson; in another, a man looks on the verge of losing consciousness from lifting the same instrument.

Frank strolls in a vanishing New York in Carl Watson’s novel excerpt, “A streetcorner in limbo.” Aware that nostalgia is just a scarecrow to ward off change, he can’t entirely resist it.

In Mike Corrao’s imagined apartment complex, there’s no reason to stay: landlines are severing, fires igniting, potential meteors dropping—yet no one can bear to leave.

Five poems by Josh Lipson locate his studies of Levantine language and culture as a passageway in which he may declare his allegiance to idle reverie.

The speaker in two poems by Dante Fuoco, calloused by waiting and the wind, runs late and turns the ticking of time into song.