I am twenty-four years old and I have lived for less than fourteen days. I have never seen the woman I am about to meet but she knows me intimately. What am I? Apparently he enjoyed these kinds of riddles, which is to say I enjoy them, or I should; […]
Ten Theories | A. Molotkov
Ten Theories 1 The street ends in a dead end, a space removed. Air currents flow around it. Fading gravity. You, inside, at least in theory. It takes a lot of bulbs to light the world. 2 I arrived before too early. I remember your birthmark. Now it’s no longer […]
Tied Up With String | Kate Tough
Another thing Sheridan has never gotten used to about Ross is his expressionless sex face. He’s almost soundless, too, but that’s par for the course: guys rarely make much noise except when a few beers have featured (uh-UH-I’m gonna co-o-ome!). The exception was the one who’d moaned and bucked like […]
September Mourning | Paul K. Smith
SEPTEMBER MOURNING A Ten-minute, One-Act Ceremony in 3 scenes for 4 actors in a performance space: 1. “Arrival” 2. “Boy Meets Girl” 3. “A Day of Promise” First presented as “A Day of Promise in New York” at Players Theater, NYC, June 21-24, 2018. Produced with the same cast at […]
Two Poems | O-Jeremiah Agbaakin
my God says it’s not in my job description to stay clean. hygiene is monetized farce. a trick to keep soap & rehab & the church & conscience & your silence in business. i scrub my own tongue hard to a shiny silence. a bad childhood stuttering cannot be blamed. […]
The Sinkhole | Joyce Li
ONE The sinkhole appeared without warning one night, opening up at the end of our driveway as if to swallow us whole. Anderson and I bought the house—a run-down Victorian in upstate New York—in the hopes of restoring it ourselves, but the plain truth was that it was in even […]
Still | Katherine Gibbel
Katherine Gibbel grew up in Brooklyn, New York. Her writing has been published in or is forthcoming from Bat City Review, The Bennington Review, Guesthouse, Tin House Online, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she received her MFA in […]
The Man With Blue Eyes | Samantha Lê
The Man With Blue Eyes i. legs like birch trunks stripped white by winter ginseng root toes mangled from wear chest scarred the color of wheat fields but he smears like wet ink when we touch ii. we celebrate the harvest moon forgetting to mourn the death of summer launched […]
Works on Water: An Impression of ‘Voices from the Roanoke River’
In the recent year, the Trump administration has flouted many environmental protection laws within its borders. In the international scene, the administration took the U.S. out from the Paris Agreement when even war-torn Syria, the only hold-out, signed it. The administration is obviously tone-deaf to what is happening to the […]
An Interview | Edwidge Danticat
As a writer, Edwidge Danticat is revered for her elegant prose and her moving depictions of Haiti and the Haitian diasporic experience. She has written more than a dozen books, including her debut novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory, which was an Oprah Book Club selection, and the memoir, Brother, I’m Dying, […]
An Interview | Yiyun Li
Yiyun Li is the author of two story collections, two novels, and, most recently, a book of essays called Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life. When I read her novel Kinder than Solitude, I was just beginning to take writing seriously, and the psychic familiarity of her characters spooked […]
Little Fishes | Michael Hawley
“Put you in the piss tank and flush you too!” Mandy. Five years old, half awake. She stands in the kitchen in her cloud-print PJs, curly brown hair bunched up on one side. Gramma Jean at the table lights a Kool. “What did she say?” “Piss tank,” says Pete by […]
An Interview | Lisa Ko
Lisa Ko is the author of the much-acclaimed The Leavers, which won the 2016 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction and was a finalist for the National Book Award for fiction. The novel follows the story of an undocumented immigrant woman and her child in the U.S. – a story […]
Celebrity | E. Y. Smith
E. Y. Smith’s work has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and Thoughtful Dog and is forthcoming in The East Bay Review. [pdf-embedder url=”https://www.bkreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/CELEBRITY.pdf”]
Ursus: a tavern play in verse | Jason Brown
Jason Brown is a playwright and writer from Ireland. Since graduating from the DIT Conservatory of Music & Drama in Dublin with a Degree in Drama (Performance) a decade ago, he has been writing for the stage and publishing much of his poetry and short fiction here. [pdf-embedder url=”https://www.bkreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/URSUS_a_tavern_play_in_verse-1.pdf” title=”URSUS_a_tavern_play_in_verse”]
Lovely Madness | Ariella Carmell
Ariella Carmell is a third-year student and writer at the University of Chicago. She has had prose and poetry published in Maudlin House, Spry, Words Dance, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Souvenir, Cleaver Magazine, Burningword, Alexandria Quarterly, and other places. In the past, she has also been named a 2014 Foyle […]
The Spiral Path | James B. Nicola
The Spiral Path When it is three-dimensional or four how can you follow one, you ask. Think of a mountain road, up an ideal mountain too steep to climb directly. So you find the road that’s been paved before. It circles, rises, narrows to the summit a perfect apex with […]
An Interview | Phil Klay
Phil Klay is the author of the short story collection Redeployment, which won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2014. He’s a graduate of the MFA program at CUNY Hunter, and a Marine Corps Veteran who deployed to Iraq. I met Phil a year after I left the military and returned to […]
Legendary Wolves; In Memory Of Peter Stumpp’s Daughter (Redux) | Emma Johnson-Rivard
Emma Johnson-Rivard is a Masters student at Hamline University. She received her undergraduate degree in Film Studies at Smith College in Massachusetts and currently lives in Minnesota with her dogs and far too many books. Her work has appeared in Mistake House, Moon City Review, and the Santa Ana River […]
Beeswax | Kelsey Ann Kerr
Beeswax This is the first time that I have cried in a long time, and I realize more than I ever have before what a good person Tom is. I am glad that he told me off. I did treat him like I was being his counsellor, and I […]