You’ve felt like this since you became conscious at four years old. Always rushing to smother your sibling with a blanket to protect them from the cold. You can be too much. You want with an adrenal magnitude. You want the squares of sky in between the skyline, you want the sweet young trees, you want the girl bent over on the side of the passing bus, orange juice, pie and big drinks of wine.
Toronto 488 | Aaron Kreuter
That night, I feverishly read through the novel, sitting at my mother’s kitchen table in the dark, my cup of coffee long cold beside me. This was it. This was what I had been trying to do for all those years. The novel’s characters grew up in Jewish Montreal in the sixties and seventies, moved to Toronto in the eighties, bringing with them their dramas, their prejudices, their recipes, their joys.
Postcard From the Edge | Sara McAulay
I closed my eyes. The narrow rocky trail. The deep, deep canyon. My stomach reeled. No guardrail, no parachute, no wings, and me with no terminal illness. Me, weaker than I’d ever suspected I could be. “How soon? I’ve got deadlines. Could we wait till Fall?”
She laughed again, then coughed, coughed again, her whole frame wracked. “For you,” when she could speak, “for you, I’ll buy a postcard.”
Metric Birthday | Aley Waterman
The days are long and light so late. Ceremony is the faint lull of your roommate playing “Linger on your pale blue eyes” through a thin painted wall while you boil a kettle. The inside of a blue eye is like Iceland. Iceland is like a hot bath body with a cold forehead but you haven’t been, except in the airport. The Reykjavik airport is like a coffee shop.
The Wait | Lauren Bo
I contemplate the exhaustion of grief. Perhaps I’ve never truly known it, having never known the loss of a parent, spouse, or child. Please doctor, when will this unending grieving end? You were wrong. I grieved for six months, 180 days, 4000 hours, 15 million seconds. I did my duty.
Cigarette | Gemini Wahhaj
She watched him from the back, the red glow of his cigarette a lone light against the black sky. Sometimes, she went out to join him, hastily dressed in a cotton kamiz and shalwar, a shawl wrapped around her shoulders. He turned around and gave her a smile with his stained yellow teeth, then turned back to gaze at the street below with his large, almond-shaped eyes.
Like Jousting | James Yu
I crash cars. Or rather: I crash my body into cars. Maybe that’s an exaggeration. An aspirational statement. Here’s the truth: only twice in my life have I done this.
Hunter’s Moon | Olga “Regina” Doi-Kollegger
If the harvest nights are clear, adults stir.
If comfortable, they talk about past loves. Accidents and hope. They complain about jobs and get even with the boss. They search for life’s rhythms. Delighted by the rhyme, they explore the possibilities of change. Then they lounge, drunk upon words.
Against Duplication | Chinekotam Yagazie
I remember these images in no particular order: _the fragility of his body, the sparkling nerdiness of his glasses, or the shimmering brilliance of his palm oil complexion. I was still thinking of bodies in terms of complexion when we first met. Although America has a way of taking away […]
The Real Thing | Chris Arp
Myrtle told Horace the plan. They would take the 7:14 train to the city, to a bar called The Pit Stop.
“It’s a gay bar,” she said. “But this one has a back room. Do you understand me?”
Abscission | Jill McCabe Johnson
Suffocation rarely starts in a panic. Sometimes it begins in a drowsy state of not-knowing, the air warm and dense. Do something productive. Get out of the house. I grabbed the macaroni pan, went behind the barn, plucked wild blackberries till the pan brimmed.
Ivan the Terrible Goes on a Family Picnic | Charles Holdefer
Jerry seemed a smart lad, but he was more interested in herbs and spices when he should be paying attention to poisons.
An Interview | Beth Morgan on Jake Gyllenhaal, Mushrooms, and the Perils of Pursuing Self-Actualization
A Touch of Jen, written by Brooklyn College MFA alum Beth Morgan, centers Alicia and Remy, two codependent Brooklynites miserable in their coupledom but bonded by a shared infatuation with the titular Jen—a breezy influencer with freckled boobs and adult braces whose appeal is equated to that of a “hot […]
At the Sendak Museum | Charlie Sterchi
Marianne wore a nice dress and looked very handsome in it. It was her 32nd birthday. Marianne is six feet tall. She and I had an agreement. We would see how it went at the Sendak Museum and go from there.
An Interview | Joshua Henkin on Time, Memory, and Revision in Morningside Heights
Joshua Henkin doesn’t like to think about themes—at least, not while writing. At Brooklyn College, where he directs the MFA program in fiction (and where the magazine is based), Henkin tells students that themes, as abstractions, can draw writers away from the specifics of a narrative, resulting in distortions of […]
Refining Device | Kim Parko
“There was a commotion out in the courtyard and I looked out my window to see Senior being attacked by the Big Bear and I ran out of the house and into the courtyard and yelled, Stop it Big Bear! and Big Bear turned to me with blood on his snout and I saw that he had taken a bite out of Senior.”
A Rare and Wonderful Man | Hilal Isler
“The restaurant was across the Dupont Circle Metro escalators. I must have barfed in their restroom, across the kitchen, at least a hundred times.”
Chicken Souvlaki, 1965 | Sara Brenes Akerman
The mind is a strange place. Recently I had a sex dream about movie director Peter Bogdanovich, and I don’t even have those kinds of feelings for Peter Bogdanovich, or at least I don’t think I do. Historian Robert Caro was also in the dream—the guy who’s writing the five-volume […]
The Brooklyn Review BIPOC Mentorship Contest
The Brooklyn Review BIPOC Mentorship Contest The Brooklyn Review is holding a contest to offer mentorship to BIPOC writers of Poetry and Fiction. All work submitted to the competition will be considered for publication. One winner from each genre will receive mentorship for three months, the inclusion of their work […]
Outside | Abbigail N. Rosewood
The first time I saw them, more than a decade ago now, they were standing in a circle behind the sun’s shadow.