Fiction & Poetry | The American Reader

Candor From the Print

It’s not / a functional requirement, just / an interest, something that takes / the edge off, though you pay it back / in other, sharper edges…

gloomerang From the Print

By Dagmara Kraus × Fiction & Poetry

boomgloomerang, boomgloomerang, boomboomcheroo, / gloom never skips, has no blood and no shoes…

Where We All Slowly Die From the Print

By Ersan Üldes × Fiction & Poetry

More importantly though, they lack that one vital piece of knowledge: how to lift a dead body. How, then, are they any different from that outstretched body cooling motionless before them?

I love retrieving stray balls Kierkegaard / longed to be useful he didn’t feel all that useful in his room thinking / about Christianity and would walk the streets wanting to open doors / [voices] and I feel splendid returning balls to groups of friends or / bounded fields

Mold Wall From the Print

By Blake Butler × Fiction & Poetry

I’d always felt my boy would live forever. He seemed strung with a different make of vein…

The Late Parade From the Print

By Adam Fitzgerald × Fiction & Poetry

Dreams have the following architecture: metallic substance, pursuant laws of mineralness. Vague plunder of booty, plastic robe of pearls. Sesame pirates of our wonderfully dull childhood where a perverted man usurps your surname and wanders the lawn, sprinkling reindeer tears…

Especially Heinous: 272 Views of Law & Order SVU From the Print

By Carmen Maria Machado × Fiction & Poetry

The ghost of one of the murdered, misburied underage models begins to haunt Benson. She has bells for eyes, tiny brass ones dangling from the top of each socket…

Sex with Camel From the Print

By Joyce Carol Oates × Fiction & Poetry

…the boy knew from experience that if he stepped inside the room a certain alteration of the air would unnerve him—he’d begin to feel that strange sad clutching sensation, that was also a sensation like that of sand slipping away beneath your feet…

"Symmetry" & Other Poems From the Print

By Jeff Dolven × Fiction & Poetry

Sometimes I smile before I mean it. Better, sometimes I’ve smiled before I mean it. Meant it. You know what I mean?—Sometimes I smile before I smile, or know I’m smiling, and I mean it, although I didn’t mean to—never mind–

The Goldilocks Variations From the Print

By Robert Coover × Fiction & Poetry

G enters the unoccupied cottage. Porridge, chairs, beds. Too hot, too cold, too high, too wide, too hard, too soft. Just right. G eats, breaks, crawls in. The owners return. An intruder!

Castella From the Print

By Park Min-Gyu × Fiction & Poetry

This fridge has a powerful right to speak. That’s right. A hooligan in his past life, this refrigerator was born with an unusually powerful voice…

"First" & Other Poems From the Print

By Hwang Byeong-seung and Moon Tae-jun × Fiction & Poetry

What good are the legs?
The girl
Waits
Like the rat’s daughter-in-law…

Two Poems From the Print

By Patrizia Cavalli × Fiction & Poetry

…swaying anorexic or bulimic between as always two mothers this one who loves me falsely and would deny me all food and that one who loves me falsely and would kill me with food…

Honor Thy Hands: Carpentry and Poetry From the Print

By Anna Ross, Ishion Hutchinson, Michael Collins and Yusef Komunyakaa × Fiction & Poetry

Because we touch we want to speak, to name. Because we speak we’ve learned to build beyond instinct and toward the imagination, in a refined collaboration…

Song of Your Pluck From the Print

By Anne Carson × Fiction & Poetry

Your pluck is not refreshment of honey—it is [una puerta]