“Coyote clings to the side of a boulder twice as a wide as his splayed body. He thinks he heard something down the slope, a small rock-slide or stick breaking. His fingers hold, but his boots scratch for leverage. Not that big a deal if you fell, though he doesn’t want to . . .
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The Massachusetts Review presents the latest Working Titles e-book: “THE LEADER by Nouri Zarrugh-–available this week! From THE LEADER: That last February before the war and the hard years that were to follow it, forty-one years after the Leader’s revolution, Laila woke to the sound of explosions in the street. She sat clutching the blanket, . . .
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“This is how we grew afraid.The moon wore its bright hat. The sun was a great wheelof fire. Children played jump rope in the crowded street, and everywherewas the autobiograpical,” –from “Blur” which appears in the Spring 2017 issue (Volume 58, Issue 1) Tell us about one of the first pieces you’ve . . .
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“The foam line of the lake breaks into ice.I can feel the weight of a flood, the granite of you sealing together. Still, the lake water is all quiet, no smellof rain. No sense of struggle or lungs folding…” –from “Auroras” which appears in the Spring 2017 issue (Volume 58, Issue 1) . . .
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“Barren field, tin sky, coudsthe color of clouds. Why describe thingswhen things describe themselves? Besides, there’s nowhere to turnwhen your shield against despairbecomes its source,” –from “Igloo” which appears in the Spring 2017 issue (Volume 58, Issue 1) Tell us about one of the first pieces you’ve writtenI don’t remember the first . . .
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“On a Chilly January morning in 1893, Louise Imogen Guieny took the train from Auburndale to Boston and made her way with the brisk, long-legged steps of a practiced walker to 246 Boylston Street. When the poet entered the warmth of Perkins Hall, her gold-rimmed spectacles must have immediately fogged over. Yet . . .
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In 2010, I was thirty-one years old, running twenty-five miles per week, doing yoga twice a week, and eating a vegetarian diet. My blood pressure was 110/60, I weighed 135 pounds, I took multivitamins and omega-3s, I flossed daily. I was so healthy I was smug about it—I’d never even broken a . . .
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”BEITHE WAS A LOUD CITY. It had the loudness of a city not yet used to itself. Steel clicked against steel and stone echoed stone. There was no respite from its noise. On a bend in the road in the center of Beithe, there stood a house. It was known to all . . .
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Responding to the shocking reality of the recent US election, Aleksandar Hemon wrote in the Village Voice, “For me, the symptom of that experience is a constant traumatic alertness, a terrible, exhausting need to pay attention to everything and everybody and not succumb to the temptation of comforting interpretation . . .Trauma makes everything . . .
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“When I was eight years old, my mom invented a game called “getting lost.” She was worried, she later told me, that I was starting to feel less loved. At four and a half I’d drawn a chalk mural to welcome my new triplet siblings, but Mom feared that I’d grown to . . .
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