Christmas is all about the traditional: gingerbread, brandied eggnog, tinsel, and curling up in front of toasty fires with good stories. Or, if you’re a poor motherless MFA student like us at The Brooklyn Review: a fifth of whiskey, a shoplifted fir-scented candle, and your roommate’s three-month-old copy of The New […]
Two Poems | Eileen Hennessy
DEPARTURE OF THE ARK At midnight it was still chewing quietly on its anchor chain while the puddles meandering along the waterfront engulfed the chunks of watermelon we had thrown overboard after our farewell picnic. At two a.m., sound of the waterfront tugs suddenly flapping and […]
Motions for Red Coffee | Alec Hershman
Listen, my best wishes for you are built from the inside out, like a sentence after the eye falls upon a reasonable stone and opens a window I remembered to save the glass, to feel December’s bearable embrace. At the cemetery edge, the shade of a neighboring house passes […]
From One Crotchety Spectrum Septuagenarian Too Chicken To Do Real Speed | Gerard Sarnat
While First Lady Nancy Reagan was exhorting us turkeys to Just Say No, daughter Patti wrote, “my mother was a pill-popping Quaalude shrew.” As a gaggle of rugged individualists, some fellow travelers pick stimulants. Starbucks, CVS and shrinks offer caffeine, diet capsules, and Ritalin variants. Then IMHO, there’s Lockean ecstasy […]
An Interview | Monet Hurst-Mendoza
Monet Hurst-Mendoza is an accomplished NYC-based playwright from LA. Rising Circle Theater Collective, Looking Glass Theatre (NYC), Amios, Playwright’s Playground at Classical Theatre of Harlem, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, and many others have developed her plays. She is a current member of the 2017 Emerging Writers Group at The Public […]
Permanent Change of Station | Jake Sheff
The room is bare, except for the girls Kneeling surreptitiously by the window, Keeping watch on harbor seals. The girls Are formerly land-locked Army brats Displaced by houses, yards and fences Caught on rotating schedules like Themselves. The harbor seals are rollicking, As harbor seals are wont to do without […]