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Two Poems by Martin Rock
Lines Written After a Party in New York
It isn’t sarcasm or sadness but the feeling
of having been left to die in the middle
of a rooftop filled with one’s attractive friends.
They look at me and I try to look at them.
My eyes remain fixed on the side of my head.
My tongue is a fist submerged in ice.
I try to make my way back to the surface
to bleat but I cannot. My eyes are glassy
& probing & panicky & -
Global Voices Interviews *Poland* Bronka Nowicka and Katarzyna Szuster in conversation with LIT’s JP Apruzzese
The Polish version of this interview appeared in Biuro Literackie on 23 March 2020
Every so often a writer comes along who shows us what literature can and perhaps is meant to do — offering not so much a different perspective as a different way of seeing. A writer whose work inhabits a space undetermined by convention, trends, topics of current interest, unafraid to put aside the noise of daily life and explore the unnoticed – unseen because ignored – life that is nevertheless fully within our grasp.
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“By Bread Alone” by Danny Bellinger (wil’um)
When I was a young boy I learned that you could shoot a man for disrespecting your sister, even if he was her husband and your brother in law. All you had to do was trick your kids into believing the weapon was a cap gun by putting caps in the hammer, before you fired into the night air at the man who’d limp for the rest of his life for reasons unbeknown to me. That’s what my father did. My brother tells me years later that the fake cap gun is the reason why my uncle limps like he does.
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“Regnum” A short story by Bronka Nowicka (translated from the Polish by Katarzyna Szuster) Artwork by Lula Bajek
Regnum
Mad Mary, Ursula, insane Nina, haunted Agnes, guide me. Let me stick my hands in the pockets of your housecoats, where the keys are nestled in the bundles of your handkerchiefs. Let me steal them and set the door to the kingdom ajar.
At night Nina kneads bread and weeps into it. In the kitchen, the milk gives off light until she pours it into dun flour and then it goes out. The woman kneads the dough in the dark. The table squeaks,
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“Apartment by Teddy Wayne” Reviewed by LaVonne Roberts
Apartment is Teddy Wayne’s fourth novel and an easy read in just over 200 pages. Wayne’s novel gets to the crux of every writer’s angst in an MFA program: when you strip away the art of craft, is your writing any more interesting than yourself? Offering a rare glimpse of what happens in a workshop and the sheltered creative writer’s MFA community, Apartment speaks to what a privileged, highly-competitive MFA degree does or does not do for a writer. Moreover, it speaks to male identity in relation to male friendship.
Set in 1996,
