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The Human Landscapes of Edward Mc Whinney
Advice: Get the Farewell Right It was supposed to be the happiest day of the year. That’s what they all said at work; Andy boy, this is it, the best day of the year. The place was all abuzz wit...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2023/the-contrary-landscapes-of-edward-mc-whinney/
Caught
He found a woman on Tinder, but then she wanted to meet for the first time at her house. No woman had ever wanted to meet him at her house. They had some sort of rule book: a public place, a neut...
Two Poems
Haibun with Trump Flag Eve got a lot of property, huge garden, once she left Adam, moved out into the country, away from private trees, long lists of rules. She planted an apple orchard, fields o...
About Dumbo
It is, in simplest terms, an eyesore. A needle prick to the pupil. Imagine a wooden barrel, old and water worn. Take a chainsaw to its body, cut it into thin slices. Hang busted-open acorn shells...
Four Poems
Leaving Why didn’t you just leave? I swam into a coastal cave that began to fill with water at high tide. Don’t you have family you could have gone to? The yellow finch by the porch brought h...
At the Place of the Rapids
… on account of his is a ripoff and makes my ears ring, she said. And on account of his havin too small teeth and a foreskin like a dry ass old sow lip. And could he had done it to no one stupi...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2023/at-the-place-of-the-rapids/
Someday, I Identify as a Prairie
Glory be to the improper plot: this acre of hand tilled hibiscus & the dying raven that slants midway, in collapsed grace. I am thankful for everything that lays chaotic. jagged landmass. raked m...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2023/someday-i-identify-as-a-prairie/
Not Yet Twenty
I watched a so-called art-house film with subtitles on the television. I watched for an hour, then as I made my way upstairs, though I was not yet twenty years old, I felt like an octogenarian fi...
Dionysius
Sitting drinking red Gatorade in the bath, water almost scalding with clementine coriander flavored froth, I reformulate my metaphysics. That is, tonight I’ll rationalize my lust to calm my bre...
Absolute Arse
Months devolve into weeks into days into hours, metaphysical weather accrues, sweaty office girls, labourers and butcher’s assistants soaked in deodorant wish for long life and health like the ...
Vanilla Sensibilities
I don’t remember the affair that we had when we were co-workers, and I was 19, and you were 33. If I did remember...
What Colour Is A Gum Leaf And What Shape?
Perhaps I have the snake to thank. Before I saw it sliding, fast across the path, before I froze and watched it simply melt away, I hadn’t thought to fix my wandering gaze on ground. Nor notice...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2023/what-colour-is-a-gum-leaf-and-what-shape/
The Refugee
The girl stopped me, motioning towards the open takeout container in my hands. She was no more than thirteen, her face open and empty as the moon that hung over Istanbul that night. She glanced a...
Stars on the Ceiling
The stars on the ceiling don’t glow much anymore. They haven’t since Miss Jessie left, or maybe it just seems like that. Either way, Nolan still looks at them as he lies awake. Mama Caswell s...
Miles and Music
My grandfather dies on the stairs, no doubt dressed from hat to socks in maroon and gold. He is ready for the game, ready to chant “For Boston” on behalf of the Boston College Eagles, but his...
The Freight
The snow was disintegrating into a puddle beneath my feet at the cliff where I’d been standing for the past four hours, keeping my eyes sharply peeled as I was commanded. I was unnecessar...
Saturnine
On All Souls Day, I descended the infinite well of marble steps, down and down, it was a bank holiday in Catalonia with businesses closed so the street gave off that dull, saturnine feeling of ol...
A Weekend in Aubervilliers
I’d seen the guy in the leather jacket out the corner of my eye. When he caught me up at the entrance to the Metro I absently moved out of his way as I felt for my ticket.
https://contrarymagazine.com/2022/a-weekend-in-aubervilliers/
Three Poems
Sometimes I wonder if I should not be a teacher +++ because children terrify me with their tenderness. Danny, before he hated me, would hand me sticks of green gum wrapped in paper, “For you Mi...
Blush, Revenge, Utterance
Gena Rowlands confessed on only one occasion that she almost left John Cassavetes while filming Opening Night. There was something about the slap, the lunge for it, that shred both her & Myrtle G...
Glioblastoma : Starlight
Astrocytes in the brain seem as numerous and shapely as stars in the universe, but when the stars in your brain go awry, they behave like dark energy, changing the shape of time. You see time’s...
The Intruder, 14
In February, twilight washes over this part of California at 5 p.m. Gerald stayed at school as long as possible, so he wouldn’t have to do this in broad daylight. But even as the shadows length...
Two Poems
Crossing Benue after reading Nnadi Samuel burnt consonants laid at my feet. ++++++++I begin this poem where the vowel ends. it ends inside a lagoon. this ...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2022/two-poems-by-chinedu-gospel/
This Afternoon in Washington Square
This afternoon in the kitchen, Robby and I chase each other around the table— Hey hey we’re the Monkees—until my dad comes booming in shouting about the damn racket at this hour on a Saturd...
Two Poems
How to Tell the Difference Between a Raven and a Crow One. For sorrow or joy, crows are the abacus of the common people. Two. The Tlingit know a duality of Ravens: creator and thieving trickster....
https://contrarymagazine.com/2022/two-poems-by-bethany-f-brengan/
Death Excavation
The photograph shows the falls flinging down colossal volumes of water with so much violence, some shatters into a mist. The roar must be terrifying, sweeping all commercialism aside, the pink-an...
Three Poems
On Gratitude Outside, crows roost on telephone wires and the palm trees sway in the wind. Across the street, an elated dog drags its owner toward the fire hydrant. For breakfast, I’ll brew tea ...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2022/three-poems-by-despy-boutris/
Three Poems
Stillbirth The sun bursts in through bathroom window like an opinionated Aries, drives its body into the shower with me— lights up every edge of tile, curve of fundal mound: I am still swollen ...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2022/three-poems-by-rae-hoffman-jager/
Two Poems
Fern at the St. Louis Children’s Hospital I didn’t know it was live until a child began picking leaves from the fronds, letting them drop to the floor like those long hospital minutes. No one...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2022/two-poems-by-renee-emerson/
The Plaster Room
My first death was way back when I signed a contract for the job as hall porter in the Happy Valley Refrigeration Company. Reserved and cool in my brand-new uniform, I waited every morning on The...
After the Joy of the Grad School Acceptance Email Dissipates. Or: On Dread
night class means wonder. means future pay-bump. or the spring acceptance letter means i’ll see you next decade. it’s selfish to pack up all your dinner plates and say I’ll be back before y...
Silvia
The radio said that Silvia would be a category one hurricane. Hours before her arrival I developed a grade-one buzzing in my ears, much more troubling than a common tinnitus. I feared that Silvia...
The Other Acapulco
The rain came down that day in angry, ruthless sheets, turning the hillsides to mud, pushing the workers’ shanties down toward the beach, toward the fancy hotels where they labored serving the ...
Three Poems
Humpty Dumpty Asks What Happened While you wandered through anesthetic dreams, they shaved your head sleek as a hard-boiled egg, carved a curved incision into its side, and pulled your jaw muscle...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2022/three-poems-by-evan-gurney/
A Song of Silence
I am young when I meet him. I don’t think I am (no one does at eighteen), but I am. At that age, I think I’m queen of the world. Level-headed, responsible, mature to a fault. Careful. Reserve...
Requiem and Resurrection on Easter
+++++I. +++++Kyrie Have mercy —+++++there is too much grief +++++grinding in our heart: an unrelenting rain spelling poignantly on the streets and the bright pebbles, +++++on the common places ...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2022/requiem-and-resurrection-on-easter/
Dark Matter
If the boy continues to ruminate, he’ll have dark thoughts. No one to stop him. Not even the girl he is always thinking about, the one who plays with toads, talks to them, and squints hard when...
Samuelle
Grandma Cillie has never said a word about the three weeks spent at her sister’s when she sought distance from what was happening with my Uncle Avery. Good thing Grand Aunt Moll talks, or I wou...
We Were Girls Once, Dancing
I cup my hand to the DJ’s ear. We’ve stumbled into that sloppy part of the night. The cake cut. The bouquet tossed. The grandparents and children on their way to bed, and the men around the b...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2022/we-were-girls-once-dancing/
To the Family on the Overnight Train
I arrived first. Empty, the train compartment welcomed me with silence and glorious space. A temporary respite while I got sorted out. Years of travelling on the fly had taught me that solutions ...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2022/to-the-family-on-the-overnight-train/
Two Poems
Excursion, in the Year of Unmaking Hoping to descend from the year of unmaking – we went, that evening, for a walk. In the park there was a house, burnt in demolition. Don’t look at it – my...
Three Hours in Central Pennsylvania
Hour 1 He said his folks would like me. He used that word, “folks,” and I asked if that’s how people spoke “in these parts.” He laughed. Danny’s mother sat on the porch and greeted us...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2022/three-hours-in-central-pennsylvania/
Two Poems
Lovely is the World —after Yehuda Amichai It is still early in this century and there is still a lingering scent of hope, and flowers still decorate cemeteries and even in camps where families ...
Three Very Short Stories
I was trying to help when I told you what I saw him do. How he slipped his hands into her back pockets to bring her close.
How Deep in the Valley
While passing the time in a coffee shop with a latte and Facebook, a photo pops up of you on a lawn of dandelions. I laugh to see your elfin face, short, punky, chestnut hair, silver ring in your...
The Magpie of Superstitions
Breaking my journey at Cheshunt I throw bones under the disinterested gaze of commuters. The omens are not auspicious. They never are, some would say. With Saturn quincunx to Virgo I am, as the s...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2022/the-magpie-of-superstitions/
What Filled The Room
I don’t remember how young I was, but I can still see the wooden bench I sat on to untie my favorite blue sneakers and the row of beige metal lockers I and my fellow campers faced as we rushed ...
The Myth of Chang’e
Chang’e is a god, but one to be pitied. For millennia, no one has begged anything of her, for no one envies her. Though she receives offerings, they are a kind of cruelty, a cruelty of kindness...
Two Poems
Phototaxis It’s a process, opening back doors after dusk: unlock, dim lights so flies and moths don’t cloud the porch sconce, suicide windows, try to squeeze through the yawn of a door kicked...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2021/two-poems-by-moriah-cohen/
The Body of the Man that Remains
It is spring in California and the clouds won’t burn off and the water looks dusty.
https://contrarymagazine.com/2021/the-body-of-the-man-that-remains/
Hypnosis
After dark, the prairie ripens with desire. Fields of want and dust vibrate under your feet with lust. Cicadas, crickets, locusts all jump in your blood as the light shyly melts, blushes in heat ...
Invasive
I had been thinking towards the death of my mother for years. How would I grieve? How would our story, sparse as it was, end? And then it happened: My mother, who I had never met, who I had spok...
In Preparation for That Which Will Inevitably Wreck Me
What will I do when so far from now my memory conjures up the sunbaked scent of my mother, the sharp sweat stench of my father? The cologne of an ex on the clothes of a new one, the coffee factor...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2021/in-preparation-for-that-which-will-inevitably-wreck-me/
When I Say Yes I Will Yes
which I don’t, but imagine for a moment that I marry my English turnkey. I pour beer at King’s Arms. I push buttons when drunks throw glass at the karaoke machine. I duck. I walk home at midn...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2021/when-i-say-yes-i-will-yes/
Three Poems
Mania Just writing the word scares me. I said, “Of course you’re not manic.” You said, “They noticed how quickly I moved, a car speeding through red lights my words piling up, crashing in...
When We Were Girls
I’m lying on the edge of the lake. My head is cupped by ice-crusted mud. My hands and bare feet tingle. A cop is there, hovering over me. She’s a black woman in her thirties, her eyes wet and...
Love and Trouble
I opted to change my status from “virgin” to “non-virgin” on January 16, 1991, the same night that George H. W. Bush’s White House announced Operation Desert Storm, a U.S. military oper...
Any Other Night
I am pumping gas after work at an intersection I have frequented many times after dark without incident. I leave the pump unattended, am sitting in my car scrolling on my phone while the meter ti...
Dear Parents, Know This
Somewhere in your epoch of child-rearing—with babe on hip or perhaps much later—you will shatter completely. You will be destroyed. How could it be any other way? When your children cry, I do...
Sales Force
Sold A saleswoman and her customer meet in an alley. They kiss as if they already know each other. “Your skin still smells like easy money,” he whispers, running his hand through her hair. �...
Two Poems
Taxonomies: Me, Too I. Gloves Marshmallow-thick ski gloves. A pair strung from toddler sleeves. Lost mate waving from a puddle. The snapped rubber glove that splits open on the orthodontist’s h...
Across the Valley
I’m a cosplayer, but not the usual kind. I’m a person pretending to be a robot pretending to be a person.
Three Poems
A Florida man ‘thumbed’ an alligator in the eye to rescue his dog from a ‘death roll’ (Or this is how we say “I love you”) When he gets around to the duty of fathers, you can hear Dav...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2021/three-poems-by-jared-beloff/
Outis Odysseus
He has been gone // a lifetime. In the interval, another olive tree from a dropped pit. The prime of a fleet hound who knew all day each minute’s different scent. Ask Argos: is the world Odyss...
Why Annie Oakley and Dolly Parton Had No Children
Mother rhinestone, mother curled lashes, great head of the household asleep with foam rollers in her hair, wound into spirals. Unravel, comb out, spray up to heaven and higher, high as the ladder...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2021/why-annie-oakley-and-dolly-parton-had-no-children/
Dissociate
My oldest didn’t know where her body began and her mind ended. She couldn’t feel the sensation of embodiment, as if she were always afloat in astral projection. She could swallow, could walk,...
Goodnight Noises Everywhere
“There’s a bit of an animist bent—everything has a spirit—but the expected ‘Paranormal Activity’ plot never develops. He says goodnight to everything, but nothing says goodnight back....
https://contrarymagazine.com/2021/goodnight-noises-everywhere/
(electricity)
What is less real than the daughters I dreamed, With their terrible, Homeric names, Mare And Nightmare, how are they any less real Than the daughters I never conceived, the months Of bleeding whe...
5-2
One morning in early November, a letter arrived in the post.
Three Poems
Dear Life, the tree of which my son sleeps beneath or sometimes doesn’t, depending on the vicissitudes of the day before the night, &, too, the blackness of the night itself, though let’s put...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2021/three-poems-by-joe-wilkins/
The Swoon Theory
My friend messages me: YOU ARE TOO GOOD TO BE THE OTHER WOMAN. I want to respond: WHO CONSTRUCTED THE PARAMETERS OF GOODNESS?
Love Fugue
Exposition Jamelle Raizer, my birth mother, was the first in her family to marry a non-Jew. She had long, dark curly hair. Sang as she stepped out of the shower. She gave me away and checked hers...
What If All Our Sex Rituals Were Narrated By David Attenbor...aybe Love is Only a Chemistry Problem We Are Trying to Forget)
I want David Attenborough’s rich, flowing voice. I want him to focus on the finer details under the dim light of our kitchen, the place where love and dancing around the right sequence of lucky...
The Artifact
I cautiously pick up the well-worn Bible. It’s been years since I opened it, but I used to carry it around with me quite a lot. In those days I attended an evangelical college and we often had ...
The Artist of the Ugly
THE INCIDENT The pensive screen blinked and The Writer could feel his heart pinging. Thirteen years of work, one page, swallowed into an abyss of lost-forever sentences in less than a second. Man...
Swan Garden
There are six swans in the backyard. They stay so close to the house that I can make out the jagged parts of their beaks when they aim for insects in the shallow, man-made pond. I can make out th...
Honeycomb
The sun dawdled on the yellow windowsill. The house was quiet. Noisy youths played ball in the street, but all was silent inside. I was as quiet as an owl in a barn, too quiet for my neighbour, V...
Down by the River
There was a small house on the bank of the Suwannee that slanted down towards the root-beer-colored water. The house was one room, the side wall a sliding glass door overlooking the sturgeons tha...
End of the Line
Allison was going to get married in Ronkonkoma, so I was waiting for the train. Summer heat shimmered over the Jamaica Station tracks. There had been a run on air conditioners; newly-installed mo...
Anatomy of a Rejection
You stand on the corner of 50th Street and 2nd Avenue on a Friday night waiting for the traffic light to change and trying to decide what you’re going to do tonight: Read The Anatomy of Melanch...
Fear North
Eight years ago, before Boko-Haram were nothing but tales that echoed out of the distance; before the word Sambisa rang ominous, bearing the mark where the rest of the north would erupt into a co...
Convertible
Angela comes awake in the night. A commotion outside. She paws Tomas’ side of the bed for an elbow, a fingertip, a soft curl. There is only the pressed sheet. In those first moments torn from s...
Dear John James Audubon
I hung suet early this year, not because I was particularly organized but because I was eager for the companionship of birds.
The Last Motherhood of Shirley Jackson
People disappear. Up Glastenbury ++++++++++and down the mountainside, through Somerset township and Bennington. ++++++++++Paula Jean Welden, 18, vanished on December 1, 1946. She was last seen ++...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2020/the-last-motherhood-of-shirley-jackson/
Dragon Dreams
A tiny baby dragon would have served us well, I think.
Two Poems
DURING COVID, SHE DREAMS OF LEAVING A MASKED MAN +++++++++++++++++++++++and then after, telling him why Because we were the bones of bees++++++++++++++++++++++++and too fragile to last beyond the...
I Will Love You Fiercely, Stranger
In the old section of Kolkata there is an even older, sacred section known as Kalighat. This neighborhood is dedicated to the Hindu goddess Kali and is said to be an auspicious place to die.
https://contrarymagazine.com/2020/i-will-love-you-fiercely-stranger/
Three Poems from the Book of James
for James David Dickey, 3/3/1966 – 10/22/2008 Etta James Was it you I saw, you full-figured soulstress, in the skinny white boy of my brother? Was it the way he threw back his black hair, me...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2020/three-poems-from-the-book-of-james/
A Long Way
Pearl sat between me and Moone in the cabin of my van. Moone was driving because Moone insisted on driving. I didn’t argue. We sailed through the Jack Lynch tunnel and struck north on the N20. ...
Two Poems
100 Feathers Tied In Bundles (Leda, after the Swan) ++++++++++from “Use,” by Derick W. Burleson How cruel to pluck so many small instruments of flight, we think, seeing these laid neatly out ...
Walk-On
1 A theater. The exterior buzzes with the usual strangers and that winter’s night sensation of vibrating air. What a shame to give up on it and enter. Inside, people won’t be stepping crunchy...
Songs of Myself
Nine-year-old me hoofing it down a wooded road of vinyl homes, delivering the afternoon paper at nightfall. A streetlamp turns on, spotlighting my wretchedness. I sing the “Welcome Back Kotter�...
Black Lives Matter
Contrary Magazine supports the protests against racist injustice. We support demonstrations in support of black lives and civil rights. We oppose the violence of the police, incitement of violenc...
Bathwater
Susan was from Beijing and didn’t speak much English. She took long, hot baths that left the mirrors afog and the floor pooled with water. And though we lived together, I didn’t know much abo...
Asp & Venom
I. Upstairs in the kitchen, a small girl holds a viper straight against the table so her father can slit its belly and drain the blood. On assignment in this Vietnamese restaurant I photograph th...
Roy
Feel bad for Roy, for the shitty way you were with him. Whatever you did was nothing, and so it was something. Roy’s hands were bumpy with warts and you didn’t want to be his link during ...
The Creeping Thief
Deathly quiet is spelled with Four letters+++D E A F The creeping thief stole My noise++snuck inside nightly Covering my ears as if I were a child who didn’t need To hear++descending quieten Li...
Because I Would Not Write the Moon for You, but for Me
Because you huddled weeping in your seat as our car arrowed its way to your childhood home. Because “arrowed,” not sped nor raced nor hurried. Because Diana. Because goddess and hunt and es...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2020/because-i-would-not-write-the-moon-for-you-but-for-me/
Ave Maria
Whom parents sold among Roman soldiers Who limps on her cane between their thighs Blessed among women, baskets of dried fruit On her arm, dates and apricots This apparition of the desert solstice...
This Is How It Goes
You will reap what you have sown, she says. Day and night, she says this, in a thin voice, taut with eighty-nine years of unexpressed emotion. Her God always was vengeful. Well, seems now he’s ...
Hydrangea
I ease pink through blue. I sulfur black and pluck yellows to keep greens. Stamen hide under white unions. I feed buds into being and untangle. Pink to blue, nutrients can squeeze their way shut....
An Experiment
Just as Eleanor Winters was sitting down at the head of the supper table that had been set up outside, beyond the shore and, against all desires of her family, on the wooden dock, she looked at h...
Forage
… is what you do in your wild daily life. I imagine a human equivalent, squatting on a tightrope, say, holding an artichoke in both hands, peeling its leaves away, and eating the tender ends as...
It Begins with Getting Up
Because he doesn’t tire of waking me, I practice bird calls on the front porch, keep a whistle in the groove of my palm. Thinking me a lover, the small thing preens himself on the goldenrod. I ...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2020/it-begins-with-getting-up/
After Hours
I used to go to clubs with a girl whose father hanged himself on her thirteenth birthday. I liked to go out with her because she would get just as fucked up as I would. We weren’t proud of it. ...
Two Poems
You, As Orlando Of course Queen Elizabeth would have loved you as you handed her rosewater. Only you would have questioned so much, changed her. You wouldn’t have liked being a man, but at the ...
Over the Air
When my body disobeys, that proves it’s mine. Someone else’s doesn’t have to obey me. And these days my body refuses the simple ordinary things it is supposed to do. It doesn’t want to ge...
Phone Call to My Mother on Her Last Birthday
I listen to her voice, the intonations, wanting to memorize the contours of her vowels, wanting to be contrapuntal. She’s smiling at her breakfast, eggs this morning that she made; she might us...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2020/phone-call-to-my-mother-on-her-last-birthday/
Fancy Me
It creeps out through your mouth when you sleep, bone by bone, then reconnects at the foot of your bed. Rail-thin knuckles wrap around your doorknob before it slides through. Outside, the night a...
Two Poems
Sea of Glass I have lost my way in my grandma’s paradise, she instructing me to mend my ways or I won’t go to heaven with her and me wondering, “Is this the fork in the road,” and, “sho...
Raspberries
Before we left for home that Iowa summer, Gramma handed me a green sprig from her raspberry thicket, the taste of tart, red berries, smothered with cream and sugar, still fresh on my tongue. Some...
Hey Christian Girl
You’re ten and afraid. You pull your fabric-covered baby book off the shelf. There, written in blue ink in your mother’s handwriting is the date you prayed to receive Jesus into your heart. Y...
Declining Rooms
Lori ran out of her house and into the rain. She didn’t bother to lock the door or check the mailbox or feed the cats. She’d left her lipstick and earrings on the bathroom sink. Her umbrella ...
Three Poems
Inside Zelli’s at Night between the Wars “The nigger drummer waved”* –and I swayed how what I imagined palm trees to sway –ignored the gay Parisians around me, their white faces lit by ...
The Salad Essay
Good Friday I got the bad news my freelance contract would not be extended. I took the bus to the lakefront and gazed at the paltry waves. Then I walked back west, bought myself an excessively la...
Dad: A Ghost
Maybe it was seeing his hand pass right through the plate of chocolate chip cookies on the table for a handful of baby carrot sticks on the veggie tray, or the crumpled tissues he left everywhere...
Buried Treasure
I My mother-in-law didn’t know she was moving. My husband said they were just going out to lunch. It was the only way. Angie had refused to budge for decades, but now she was roaming her Pittsb...
And the Wounded Disappear
Light now came in through the windows, that pale, deep forest light growing slow and incremental. The cabin smelled of smoke and incense and past lives. The windows were nearly black but for cent...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2019/and-the-wounded-disappear/
Three Poems
Toy Elegy Ending in Ars Poetica, with Lines from W.S. Merwin Just minutes after taking off, the toy plane crumples into the child’s black blanket, parts the starry fuzz, becomes 189 bodies flat...
In a Season of Perdition
He came in that summer of dust devils when my father’s eggshell blue Ford wandered late paths too dark to follow. My mother sat in her sewing room, mumbling in long twisted speeches about a “...
‘The Whole Wild World Around Some Day’
++++++++++“It is the blight was born for.” First, they make you with dog tags, nine numbers, certificates of birth. Later, you sign a non-compete for your minimum wage box-packing job. You m...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2019/the-whole-wild-world-around-some-day/
The Child, the Violin, and the Monster
My girlbody is not terrifying to the monster maker, though villagers will always fear fire. Since I was made a monster, I need not apologize for the destruction. If villagers did not chase, we mo...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2019/the-child-the-violin-and-the-monster/
Chimera
Recent advances in genetic analysis have revealed that chimerism is common. – Tim Flannery, New York Review of Books, March 7, 2019 Phantom twin who never was X and Y alike in DNA blood type bo...
The Listener
The Listener listened solemnly, as was his wont, while his wife explained her reasons for going. I cannot abide this, she said to him finally, tossing her things on a chair. I can’t take you an...
spell for homunculi / songs of hydrangeas
to make an incandescent heart / for your homunculus / first put the loam in the gourd / then the gourd in the ground / then bury yourself / nothing else is necessary / in your extinction ++++++++...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2019/spell-for-homunculi-songs-of-hydrangeas/
Mwizi
Here people are paid to look through windows at night, are given a sack of rice or a bottle of milk for peeling back the sheets in the middle of someone else’s intimate moment. There are places...
Apologia of a Lapsed Catholic
I stand before you, a godless woman and you think I am naked, but I am not. I once kissed your god of the grey desert with the kisses of my mouth, my blood turned all to wine. My hell is simple, ...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2019/apologia-of-a-lapsed-catholic/
Plumbing
once, something sheltered under my left hipbone my lover found it with open hand, blood filling her palm lines once a man brimmed me with trust++++++++and future and yet, no more. end of everybod...
Pink
It was 1985. Her room was pink, and bigger than mine, and she didn’t have to share it with her sister like I did. She had a closet with mirrored doors, and we would put a chair in front of thos...
Green
You sweet Lemon Boy, you look so good in green. ?“?Lemon Boy and me started to get along together I’d help him plant his seeds and we mowed the lawn in bad weather.?” ?You’ve got a devili...
Poem Not About the Poet’s Children
+++++No one likes poems about the poet’s children unless the kids are absolute wretches because +++++poems that praise the poet’s offspring are usually thinly-veiled hymns of praise to the ex...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2019/poem-not-about-the-poets-children/
The Present, Tense
I am walking in the field and this is All there is; all there ever is, is this: Mornings like a broken yolk in the pan, Midday rye with mayo and tomato, The late afternoon gold flakes of shirred ...
Abandoned Art
I once fell in love with a girl who abandoned all of her art, never signed any of her paintings. She’d fold up little pieces of paper into lotus flowers & jumping frogs, and staple them to bull...
Quietly in a Room Alone
A light breeze troubled the curtains and the grey beards of white gulls on the sea wall, the choppy water, the flags on the pier, trees in the gardens of mansions curving along the crest of the h...
The Idea of Birds
We read poetry aloud. He is on the ground in front of me. I rest my elbows on my knees and lean over in my beach chair. After swimming, his black curls have slid down his neck, his hair now heavy...
I Never Talk About the Blood
Nor the hunting knife which he bought at Walmart, nor about my sister who, three years later, would see the wooden replicas brought into her self-defense class and suddenly have to leave. She tol...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2019/i-never-talk-about-the-blood/
Fertilizer for Pretty Things
Flowers like having dead things plunged down with their roots. Most people don’t know, but we do. They like little bits of rotting parts, like weasel toes and bird feet and the inner soft piece...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2019/fertilizer-for-pretty-things/
Downpour
created from your image, i think of down pillows and soft bed sheets wet with the mist of rain from the spill over from windows, the illumined light of adolescence before it fulfills itself in ad...
Mausoleum
A body wants to lie down; it wants to buy a plot. Who will meet you at the entrance to this mausoleum? She there, with her head in her hands, woman of sorrow guarding the steps, bent to a phospho...
The Lesson
After the saw’s incision along the board’s grain, my brother lifts the wood to assess my handiwork, nodding careful approval. Now he has me set the glue, clamp the board to another board. I w...
God’s Blood
In June, Buni opens the last barrel of her famous black wine just before the holiday of the Saints Peter and Paul, the Summer Saintpeter—Sânpetrul de vara—when the sky opens and we can see G...
Elevation 6,985
On the Western slope of Colorado, just outside of Telluride, the San Juan Mountains have been hazy the past two days because of a fire accidentally started by a homeless schizophrenic’s cigaret...
i like to wake with intention, but sometimes i wake up with a headache
Once I awoke +++++to dishes in the sink and took +++++each soggy-crusted rim, dropped them on the floor +++++to see if they would crack. A few passed the test, while thin shards +++++of a distant...
An Interview with Edward Mc Whinney
Contrary has published 36 stories by Edward Mc Whinney, far more than any other single author in our first 15 years. We've taken this occasion to plumb the allure of Mc Whinney's work, its distin...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2018/an-interview-with-edward-mc-whinney/
Interviews with Poets Hilary Dobel and Anna Ralls
Accomplished poets who published first in Contrary.
https://contrarymagazine.com/2018/interviews-with-contrary-debut-poets-hilary-dobel-and-anna-ralls/
Interviews with Fiction Writers Laura Elizabeth Wollett and Tania Hershman
Stars of the feminine uprising in fiction.
Lighthouse Journal from Litløy Fyr
Thursday 28th April. Malmo – Stockholm – Lulea Three times the announcements change their language before I step off the train to sleep in Lars’ apartment. I have been here once before in s...
Ad Astra Per Aspera
When fire swallowed everything, our coats, our house, my sister’s other shoe, they knew the Great Depression had returned, their children would grow up in thin-walled shacks though I remember, ...
Outside From The Inside
From Isamu Noguchi to Man Ray, Poston War Relocation Center, May 30, 1942 Here, in the internment camp in the Arizona desert our preoccupations have shrunk to a minimum— the intense dry heat, a...
Ash
Ash is so fine, it, every day, filters through our letterbox and air vents. It is breathed through the nostrils into our lungs, fills our minds with poison. Furthermore we do not always know who ...
Pleas for Companionship
The passion flower had doubled back on itself, the curls of new growth returning, a snake on its own tail, twisting and thriving on the stems of dead older siblings. Stacia did not know if the ol...
It Takes All Kinds
Magic Johnson reads poems all day long. Larry Bird selects a single poem and reads it fifteen times a day. Magic Johnson will be in attendance at your book launch, “in the very front row!” La...
November
Fires smoke the air, the scent a soft comfort from an iron wood stove that calls across the snowy hillside, blazing inside with logs you and Dad needed a whole day to split and stack. You exhale ...
Falling Leaves
“I want this one for my obituary,” she turns a wallet-sized portrait toward you. You swallow splinters; don’t want to think about a world without her. Matriarch. Role model. Mother you neve...
The Unbearable Here
Mother, here's what I need you to know: this is going to hurt. This is going to slip under your nail, black and blue its pink. You'll breathe this in while you sleep, a knot, edgy and fibrous, th...
Breathe, Hold
It was soon after they’d met. They hadn’t yet married, and Laura came to a Sunday match, sitting on the bleachers all afternoon at the outdoor pool. She’d waited outside the dressing rooms ...
Three Poems
This Town Is Dying, But It is not so gone as to rid itself of Provel cheese. This town’s got a French heritage and not one good place to get a beignet, but this town’s got an Imo’...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2018/three-poems-by-kelly-kiehl/
Similar Shapes
In second grade / I learned that a rectangle does not have a diagonal line of symmetry / it can only be folded into equal parts / vertically and horizontally / when we lived in Atlantic City / my...
Stepdaughter
She cocks her head, long brown locks talk down to me. An ice princess— royal posture in the House. I provide: food, shelter, someone to ignore. Wolves deposited her— soft mouth, sharp teeth�...
Men Would Like To Tell Me
A girl left a party in Wisconsin and died. The news tells me it was cold, it was Wisconsin. The news tells me February lined the streets like old paper. The news tells me she was found with a swe...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2018/men-would-like-to-tell-me/
Pavlov Dawning
You inhale slowly, counting to 8 as the steady chill flows into your mouth, down your throat and spreads through you, balancing the burning in your oxygen starved lungs. With your eyes closed, yo...
Coming Home
05:05 am. My eyes open. A faint pearly blade of light squeezing past the blind. The distant metallic scrape of a moving tram. I lie here in the dawn’s dimness, with my dreams still lingering. �...
Prayers
That morning, news of life ending and life stirring. Beignard, my old buddy, the one they called The Whale for some mysterious reason, had succumbed to the lung cancer, at last, while Victoria, m...
Why Do Giraffes Climb Trees?
Because acacia is sweetest at the canopy and grows more beautiful when viewed from above. Because no two giraffes or trees have the same pattern, coat or bark or branch or hoof, and no two clouds...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2018/why-do-giraffes-climb-trees/
Inventing Fire in Northern Michigan in December
John Sibley Williams is the editor of two Northwest poetry anthologies and the author of nine collections, including Disinheri...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2018/inventing-fire-in-northern-michigan-in-december/
The Right Shoes
“Can you fly with a man?” Everyone admired how very large they felt, above the trees and the town. Amira had felt that way before, at what she assumed could be called the height of her life, ...
Subjects for the Smoking Room
A red-haired woman in a ballgown strolls out of an ER. There is a sky, just enough madness on it. There are flattened, halved pieces of rock for sidewalk. The living spaces here in Glass Pan, Wis...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2018/subjects-for-the-smoking-room/
Bone Music
An electronic image depicts fractures in your parietal bone. Another, the slight twist and a minor chip in your pelvis. Weeks after, a third uncovers a displaced metatarsal. Looking over the radi...
How to Fall Asleep
Count neighbors who voted to take away your health insurance, their own health insurance. Count bodies in hospital basements claimed by treatable illnesses. Listen to the steady murmur of fami...
Wild Medicine
July, Minnesota Gigi picks up speed as we wander into the woods. I could listen to the self-named “ditch witch,” medicine woman, and Herbalist Without Borders say lobelia, damiana and com...
Lost
The bells of the hospital church peal. The lighter bells count each quarter but when it comes to the serious business of the hour, the weightier bell takes over. As the hour bell counts, there is...
Alt Gratitude List: What Might Have Been If I Had Never Left Chicago
I would be a lawyer on my fourth marriage, or maybe my fourth divorce. I would be a member of Alcoholics Anonymous. I would have a three-year sobriety chip. Actually, I would have 296 three-day c...
April in Middle Age
I find myself not asking am I still sexy like all the magazines seem to demand but am I happy am I falling apart part of us decaying part of us radiant it seems that there’s a balance on the wh...
Rooms
The bathroom must have been cold in winter—our house was heated by a woodstove, downstairs—but I remember it only in summer, the window open, a blue-green damp coming down off the Allegheny f...
Three Poems
blackbirds baked in a pie my mother always sang to me and everyone so heartbreaking what rain does to snow (no chance of going on its own terms) the year she died, we were buried prematurely but ...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2017/three-poems-by-carolee-bennett/
How Gypsy Invented the Tease
Light flies across the ceiling to where hangs a picture of her mother: Praying is like sitting in a rocking chair. It doesn’t get you anywhere but it passes the time. Gypsy Rose lights candles ...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2017/how-gypsy-invented-the-tease/
Centripetal Force
“Morning radar shows eye over water, with biological returns, probably birds, inside.” —Jeff Last, meteorologist, on detecting birds caught within Hurricane Matthew Her body finds mine, pit...
Three Poems
Planting hookup, at your house 151 rum, malibu, pineapple juice Samuel Hovda was born and raised in rural Minnesota. He now attends the MA program in Creative Writing at the University of Wis...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2017/three-poems-by-samuel-hovda/
A Cutter’s Sestina (Prom ’95)
Fuck spring. Spring’s a punk in rose leather who sings under lacy stars, stars the night bruised around: My knives / are sharper / than your / knives. Na na nana na. / Here, amid my corsage of ...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2017/a-cutters-sestina-prom-95/
Say Uncle
Last day at Assumption. Bricking the belfry. Two hundred feet in the sky. It’s hard thinking up here. So I don’t. I do my job. One brick at a time. Some small talk with the young tenders. One...
Three New Stories
Blue. The smell of bread turning to toast came in the open window and my bloodhound began to salivate. He took a turn by the door, fixing his eyes on me. When I bend down to tie my laces a searin...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2017/three-new-stories-by-edward-mc-whinney/
Fair Weather Feminist
Brynn Martin is a Kansas native living in Knoxville while she pursues her MFA in poetry from the University of Tennessee. She loves ee cummings and cats almost equally.
Three True Stories
In Pleasantview Cemetery My child does not sleep, so I go walking with the bones of the dead. The stroller wheels click along the path, trees frame panes of light across the rows. The plots, gree...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2017/three-by-jennifer-delisle/
Miss Bourgeois in the Pine Barrens
She was short, with frizzy hair, nicotine stained fingers, thick glasses and a leg brace from childhood polio. She wore mud colored tweed suits and always stood with one foot on the rung of her c...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2017/miss-bourgeois-in-the-pine-barrens/
Portraiture in Time
1. Platitudes You never got tired of dressing up. Fingers familiar with the tired curvature of your hair, I run the tips of them over your shoulders and down the nape of your neck, once young. A ...
Far Aberdare
When Donna asked me to come to far-flung Aberdare, I thought about the trees in the nighttime – those burnt-bone-looking monsters that made folks huddle together. In the old days, we’d gather...
Three Poems
Circadian Rhythm Your jaw is a beam of rotting wood/ It is where sadness starts The mouth carries apple-cradled jewels/ & a heat-dipped horizon, First Child clipping crimson out of the sky/ So th...
Dot Tires of Everyone Assuming She’s Straight
Dot is tired of omitting her ex-girlfriends, the ones she cannot write without confusing pronouns or a cocked brow from the man in her workshop who keeps accidentally touching her leg. She is tir...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2016/dot-tires-of-everyone-assuming-shes-straight/
The Magician
In early 1860’s Virginia, Samuel was a rare thing, a free Negro. Rarer still, he was not a farmer, tradesman, or manual laborer. He was a magician in the tradition of Henry “Box” Brown and ...
Storm Clouds Over the State of Louisiana
1 They were sitting on the back porch. She had moved into this place the day before. He had a glass of wine in his hand. The weeds were overgrown. He was supposed to have moved in here, but he ha...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2016/storm-clouds-over-the-state-of-louisiana/
Two Poems
Meditation on the Butterfly Effect What if the child has a fever, the mother bending in to wake her as the heat rises up from her skin? What if the child stays home, the sleep-damp curls swept wa...
Little Pitchers Have Big Ears
Emily always knew that her second cousin, Paul Williams, could die from Africa. Snakes susurrated along the rafters of his house. Malarial mosquitoes brandished dread proboscises; alligators open...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2016/little-pitchers-have-big-ears/
Range Folding (Populus)
“We’re making our weather with a lone light bulb.” — Blake Schwarzenbach May mist on an October morning, a dim light in a closet with no light. Like a storm, we are all vectors: direction...
Pablo Escobar’s Hippos
The blue-eyed plecostomus will not eat shit, and they will not eat driftwood covered in shit. It is unfortunate that submerged wood sustains them because Pablo Escobar’s hippos unload turd a...
The City is a Lonely Pandemonium
James thought that he might try to sleep with Madeline today, but he would not, because he didn’t really want to, except that Madeline might finally make him feel like he had touched another pe...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2016/the-city-is-a-lonely-pandemonium/
disjointed: notes on healing
fistula fis·tu·la an abnormal connection between organs. I’m freshly eighteen years old. The piercer clamps my tongue with forceps and says oh, that thing’s just begging to be pie...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2016/disjointed-notes-on-healing/
Of Ramadas and Monsoons
People who collect more cars than they’ll ever need in a lifetime live in prison camps of their own design, addicted to crack or heroin or a combination of alcohol and air conditioning that ...
Current
In between the flash and boom of thunder, I count eleven seconds. Though it’s the middle of the night, we’re both awake, lying face-to-face closer than the four-person tent necessitates. B...
The Last Miracle of Kitezh
Look at our sky. You’ve never seen as sky as murky and dark as this one. Strange shafts of light are all we know of the sun. We never see the stars. Have you realized, yet, that this isn’t sk...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2016/the-last-miracle-of-kitezh/
Someday They Will Both Wield Hammers
Somewhere east, a single mother hides her daughter’s bra, conceals the evidence of her blooming behind a Jack pine door. She descends the guilty stairs in too tight heels, slips money into a cr...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2016/someday-they-will-both-wield-hammers/
Three Poems
Early Morning, San Bernardino, 1969 Even then I knew: my father was waiting for a message and we were supposed to be witnesses. He could not stop his mind’s wild associations, but the sky kept ...
When We Were Birds
The light shifts here, the angle lengthening through the curtained window in the back. The boy's face, however, remains sharp and clear. Perhaps, too, there should be some rising nighttime sound:...
The Absurdity of Curling the Curled
Does curly chest hair get any curlier when twisted around a forefinger? He’s stressed out again, and he’s doing it. It’s an automatic unbuttoning of his shirt’s top button, followed by a ...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2016/the-absurdity-of-curling-the-curled/
Witch Cake
Pious mouths foam For measurements. The afflicted, always Some woman. Ill-fated poppet. Aproned, but odd. How different is any one of us When fallen quiet or despised? Or alone. Our hearts all he...
Gilt
They had no papers, no means of travel; and a surly guard with a knife was at the door. “Dreaming of El Dorado” by Marie Arana This transparency shows where I’ve been kissed by lovers, note...
Stolen Missed Connections
The snakebites looked really good on you. we talked about how good the jukebox was and that there is a loneliness in this world so great. you mentioned applying to be a fruit expert in roxborough...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2016/stolen-missed-connections/
When We Speak the Language of Ashes
All the walls smell like you: the smell of green on the Earth’s tongue. Even your eyelashes are inescapable. We are falling toward the detonation of ruptured neurons leaving only pink and squis...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2016/when-we-speak-the-language-of-ashes/
Shake
Michael Faraday creates tiny earthquakes to watch the shaking. Try it: Spread sand on a metal sheet. Strike the edge with a violin bow and make that metal sing like catgut. See how particles jump...
El Shaman
De puerta cerrada, huye el Diablo. The devil flees from a closed door. ~ Mexican proverb My ex-husband is a shaman now. He wears white cotton pants and gathers his supplicants together under the...
Palpitations and Seizures
Never with alcohol. Never more than one. Your heart headbangs its way out of any acceptable range, its beat erratic, an overzealous metronome, a mosh-pit shaker sweaty and bruised—so frantic th...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2015/palpitations-and-seizures/
The Cargo
Dusk. Now the bloodstar appears. In the dimness, a wooden hut, scarlet vines that engulf it, seclusion surrounded by barren land, a shadowed vastness that draws down to the river. The life that i...
Cupcake
If I’ve ever been booked, Junior asks. Come again? I fold my hands and force a smile, to show how polite I am, to create an impression. You have a record? I’m like: A record? Of what? Arrests...
See If You Don’t Come Back
But not tonight, tired today. The air dusty spider web tufting from attic lumber. Smell of crushed cicada shell, grass, other. I’ve got a face for nothing. There isn’t any cost in that. Not i...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2015/see-if-you-dont-come-back/
Three Poems
Anna Ralls lives in Columbia, Missouri. This is her first publication.
San Sepulcro
David Kirby‘s collection The House on Boulevard St.: New and Selected Poems was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2007. Kirby is the author of Little Richard: The Birth of Rock ‘...
Calvin Looks Around
As the slug1 buried2 beneath a recurring3 hosta4, I5 have6 lived7 a sheltered8 life.9 1 Ms. Howler is the broomstick of a teacher who made me write that sentence up there. The assignment was to w...
Good Stewards of the Earth
To say that we are siblings is not enough. I’m not speaking just in terms of biology, but of the physicality. When we lay our arms side by side on the table, there exists still a shadow of doub...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2015/good-stewards-of-the-earth/
Kovacs
The Oslo Bar is down by the river, down the docks, you can hear the cranes, the winching, you can smell the dust and pick up a few kilos of bananas or a bag of coal from urchins. March is a rough...
Tears
What I do not understand is where the tears go. A baby’s 2:00 A.M. cries for mother’s milk. Perhaps an ounce. A child’s skinning a knee. A couple of tablespoons’ worth, possibly. Lost and...
The Horses of Sanlùcar
Edith told her husband she was leaving him and moving back to America. He was standing in the bathroom, a towel wrapped around his waist, shaving cream lathering his cheeks. His back muscles twit...
Geographies
He dumped her via a terse, two-line email. Which was surprising because for the two years they had been together he had fulfilled her requests for old-fashioned letters by writing them on unlined...
Six Poems
Your Treasures Are Marbles Your treasures are marbles, matchbox cars, old maps, fly fishing lures you find in the reeds. Hers are shells, antler shards, acorns, the tip of a raccoon’s tail foun...
Four Poems
Fins Sometimes I dream you’re one of those Florida mermaids in highway towns, slipping your legs into a green iridescent tail. You kick past coral reefs built from scaffolding, pearly conch she...
Four Poems
Ode to Stretchmarks Elegy for your Breasts Amber Cloud Spring Cleaning Janlori Goldman‘s poem “At the Cubbyhole Bar” was chosen by Gerald Stern for the Raynes Prize. Janlori co-edi...
Motionless
Trees and moon stir into phantom shapes outside, playing naked on the empty street. Inside, a heavy mood hangs over the kitchen air. Where a platter of lemon-grass fish soup, fried pineapple rice...
Seventeenty
I’m almost seventy. When I was seventeen, the other day, I had no idea who I was and the future was so obscure. The people between funerals were a furnace of crazy burning faces rising like spa...
The museum is closing, the custodian said.
A girl walks through the torn city saying her silent goodbyes. She touches the walls with her fingertips. Farewell, fences. Goodbye, sweets shop selling cakes dripping with syrup and caramel squa...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2015/the-museum-is-closing-the-custodian-said/
Space Children and Fragility
Nicole Kurlich is a young writer living in woodsy Northeast Ohio with her family. She is currently focused on finishing her Associate of Arts degree from Lakeland Community College. When not wri...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2015/space-children-and-fragility/
Don’t Forget To Say Hello
It wasn’t a far drive to Grandma’s, but the kid looked for castles and in his mind this took nearly as long as going to the moon. My wife wasn’t along for the ride. She was practicing bound...
Janis
It was black-dark and pounding rain and no one was around to see her slip, barefoot, in the mud outside the car where she’d just finished the last cigarette in the pack, and not only had she mu...
The Ending
with gratitude to Paulann Petersen for her workshop springboards Born in Russia in 1968, A. Molotkov moved to the US in 1990 and began writing in English in 1993. Molotkov co-edits The Inflection...
Two Poems
Falling In, Falling Out The soup pot stirs, my hair dips into the broth, Tendrils warm against my neck like a whisper. I lean again to listen: the potatoes tell me what their eyes have seen. My o...
Box of Nazi
July 13 Ten minutes till Glee. I’ve ripped the plastic off a new box of tissues. Fluffed the first one up. Popped popcorn. Finn’s just died in real life, but he’ll always be a football-play...
Father Dunne’s School for Wayward Boys #6
One late blue September afternoon, Charley and I broke into Father L’s desk to steal the answer sheets to tomorrow’s pre-algebra test. Instead, we found his red-inked list of boys who would n...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2014/father-dunnes-school-for-wayward-boys-6/
The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone
After kicking around the West for a while (with stops in Spokane, Flagstaff, and Sedona), Stephen Cloud has settled in Albuquerque, where he’s fixing up an old adobe, working on poems, and po...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2014/the-chernobyl-exclusion-zone/
First Samuel | A Namesake
Hannah Baggott is a Nashville native pursuing an MFA in poetry at Oregon State University while teaching writing courses. She helps to run Poetics Corvallis, a poetry and spoken word group...
Three Poems
The Dun-Shi (He Went Dancing) The Body Above Where to Look for the Sleagh Maith (Margaret’s Song) Mary McMyne is an assistant professor at Lake Superior State University and co-edit...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2014/three-poems-by-mary-mcmyne/
Ghost
Once I was a man of few words even if behind it my mind was feverish. Not many moments of calm, though I learned to keep quiet. I lived in a room overlooking the pier and a field of dandelions. T...
Aerograms
“A letter from America was waiting for me at school this morning, from Mom, saying that Gram Krosschell had died.” This was an entry in my journal on March 22, 1976, in Chungmu-si, South Kore...
Two Poems
All Night, I Dream of Prisons Bless the cloud that blessed the sun and hid it from my anger, my red face. In the sometimes broad and often pressed so tight that nothing can squeeze through cont...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2014/two-poems-by-emily-van-duyne/
Talking to Plants
An old man with his feet before the fire In robes of green, in garments of adieu. ~ Roethke Goodnight, and by dawn leaves open and unroll toward my breathing. So many, they collect all the light....
Hidden Tracks
Once upon a time is what Noalee wishes she could say about this time of her life. She sighs and glances at the burgundy underbelly of the hotel awning. She was hoping travelling to a different pl...
Blue Moon
I pace the hospital room while medical staff monitors the inner workings of my son’s beautiful body. They patch his exterior—prop, unroll, swab, and cover. I stand at the foot of the bed, hol...
The Nervous Writer
The writers all sat round the table, sipping slowly from their beers, like wolves to baited blood. The nervous writer was due any minute and with luck he would suffer a complete breakdown. But be...
Calligraphies
Cai Guo-Qiang speaks In the old days in China my father collected calligraphy, ancient scrolls, and rare books. We lived in Quanzhou, across the strait from Taiwan. We could hear artillery batter...
Confessions of an Aging Lesbian Poet
I was a spinner for the winking eye of any needle. A whore for fluorescence, that retro-electromagnetic easy smile between the legs. It’s good for a while. You’re more a skeptic. Red for love...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2014/confessions-of-an-aging-lesbian-poet/
Labor Day
The albino crocodile has no concept of her own captivity. Pressed against her habitat by the crowd, I watch the great lizard balance on crooked arms plump as the sausage-limbs of babies who have ...
Before Dubai, This Ellay
She changed her name from Juanita to Ellay the week after she moved to Dubai. Then she changed her hair from blonde to red-brown to black but refused to change her western style, showing her legs...
Continuous Cities
After Italo Calvino As he enters the city of Araceli, the traveler feels that he is being watched, and he is. To get to the city, he must first pass through a long tunnel of mirrors. There are ...
Alien War, Human War
written on the tenth anniversary of the Iraq invasion 1. Death is an underwater bird, not a bird at all; an eel with wings. It is a metal bird loaded up with techno-artiller...
Dangling Now, in the Erotic City of Ghosts
“The first to arrive could not understand what drew these people to Zobeide, this ugly city, this trap.” ~ Italo Calvino In the lingering Erotic City of Ghosts no one does laundry. They ...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2014/dangling-now-in-the-erotic-city-of-ghosts/
Cemetery Boy
The porch light is on, but what it doesn’t reach looks like the inside of a coffee pot. No lightning bugs or stars for hope of relief. I read a poem to him under the light and he laughs at my s...
Colorado Street
The truck shifts iffy but the engine thrums regardless, I’m rumbling through late winter early nights not knowing what gear I should grind deeper into. What I know for sure—on concrete ...
jouer au flipper
1. The woman waits on the shore. She hears the waves’ song and finds it rough like sand on a lover’s skin. She cannot displace the noise with her own words. Such news admits no modulation. ...
Kes Woodi
The red grasses. That’s what I remember. Threading my little brown hands through them on the hills in Oklahoma, my mother calling in Cherokee from the warm little cabin in the distance. The sme...
The Church of Poetry
There is something wrong in the World of Poetry (of course, something’s always wrong, which is part of the fun).We quibble over doctrinal disputes like the institution we love to hate: the Chur...
Top Ten in Poetry
The Factory, Rebecca Lehmann • Rebecca Lehmann’s “The Factory, An Elegy in 6 Parts” is the story of class struggle as myth, as fairy tale; I’d never read anything like it before and kne...
Top Ten in Fiction
Kiki Petrosino, Allegory • When you get Dante and God into the same room, you get Kiki. We’ve published a few installments in her Allegory series, and each shines like a jewel, wild and beaut...
Top Ten in Commentary
Love Like All The Stars In The Sky, Rafael Torch • Rafael Torch wrote nine commentaries for Contrary as he was dying of cancer. This may be the only one he needed to write. It may be the only t...
Contrary’s Fifth Anniversary Recalled
Five years ago the nation was entangled in a grim war based on lies, the publishing industry was in collapse, the whole economy rushing to join it, people pulling their money out of banks—but t...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2013/contrarys-fifth-anniversary-recalled/
Three Moon Poems
Blue Moon If you called the name of a ghost on the fourth full moon of a season, it would carry it back through the hole in the horizon where the keeper of names buffs the scroll, the roll call, ...
The Flood
God, I thought after three days when the rain wouldn’t abate. At first I stayed home, for there was no point carrying on hoeing around in that weather. The earth turned into a big mush, and the...
At the Station House
Technically, you aren’t obligated to go to the station house. You have been invited to go, to review video footage. Perhaps this will help identify the “emotionally disturbed person”—the ...
Song, Mary
I don’t even believe in desire sometimes. Like the artist from Israel I didn’t want to sleep with— she painted Vermont’s green mountains. There weren’t any bombs in her paintings, so he...
Disinter
Here, in this Ithaca that I am writing, even daylight is acicular. There are words for what I am doing to this landscape—calumniation, a slurring of—O iced apogees and troughs, I have ruined....
The Surf and the Night
I was afraid. Sometimes the sea was quiet and the sun was in the sky all the time, or so I thought. I was tempted to run to the shore and get a swim, but I suspected a storm would break the minut...
I Get a Kick Out of You
My clitoris sings songs of love. Or lust. Most love songs are really lust songs. This is our story. Of course you know some of it but I like to tell stories so here’s our story to date—as I�...
Skin
— footnote on Wiener Oktoberrevolution, October 6th 1848 composed Oktoberfest, October 6, 2012 What glass eyes gazed out your moribund skin that manic taxidermist Thaller stretched over wood...
Even The Orange Moon Is Not More
Skinned and re-skinned (over a life’s times’ crooked course), the body you touch grows daily more strange, clad in a semblance of a remembered self, memory of a memory mirrored back into forg...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2013/even-the-orange-moon-is-not-more/
Locked
Mr. Nolan gutted trout on the workbench. Sawdust freckled their skin. He placed the fillets on butter-drubbed foil, sprinkled pepper, onion powder, and salt, and then spread the wrapped fillets a...
Dog
I am Hercules. That’s right. That’s right. Say my name. I think this when I watch him, imagine what it must be like. The way he moves suggests a knowledge of the universe I don’t ha...
Two Poems
Roommate If she drinks a mouth of fire, I dream a mouth of fire. When germs gather, I find myself accidentally caressing her toothbrush. In her room, she pulls dead leaves off the sapling. True, ...
Dead Parental Units
1. Each death a sonnet, every grief fourteen lines. Not yours. I refuse you this one thing. I sat next to you in the hospital, your mouth open on one side, your last breath escaped. I connect you...
Beautiful
A few weeks ago around midnight, I woke up and turned on the lamp. My cat, Lilly, was sitting at the foot of the bed studying the ceiling with interest. Not the hunter’s interest that makes...
What The Water Did, Elegy For Danny
To me you’ll always be the boy with the backpack, the boy whose daddy left him left us left meth in the tin house, the shed in the backyard and the two black dogs. Remember the dogs? Remember t...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2013/what-the-water-did-elegy-for-danny/
A Collapse
It was very cold. I dreamed of orange groves in Andalusia and small villages during siesta in Almeria. I turned the key in the lock and sat in the chair. There was a dripping noise, a dripping of...
Cleaving
My mom tells my dad she wishes she’d never married him, never had his children, who inherited his depression. She’s tired of being around sadness. Melancholia. A beautiful flower in another f...
Pregnancy
Mahnaz woke to the buzzing of the alarm clock. She leaned over, turned it off, and lay back. I must get up now, she thought, I will have to see Dr. Gibbons this morning. But she kept lying there,...
of angels, satin and the rest you would have hated
a body that when laid out makes me remember the sun like a sheet hung behind a high hill not quite a mountain; back at your house one of your hairs has been crushed into an oriental rug and it wa...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2013/of-angels-satin-and-the-rest-you-would-have-hated/
Endoskeleton in Amber
Threat looms like the bite of a varying hare. What is there to know about the way I have remixed hope into something that resembles my own inconsolable and yellow-toothed winter? There is little ...
Cattle Call Leaves, A Ghost Story
I felt sepultured in the snow globe Gabe gave me for Christmas, on the bridge beside its festively scarfed, hatted, and gloved characters, dropping sticks into the creek from one side, then clamb...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2013/cattle-call-leaves-a-ghost-story/
The Other Man
Tiny fires erupt behind my eyes and cut me off from the other man and the first thought that strikes me now is: perhaps my eyes were really his eyes, the one who was swathed in robes of a muddy c...
The Trouble With Paradise
I did not tell you that I come from paradise. There, the rain leaps & swirls from the slanted roof of the old white barn, comes on with the sound of pebbles, tumbled; standing on the porch you ca...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2013/the-trouble-with-paradise/
Three Poems
Woman to Pink Rose I know that you bloomed by the petals on my doorstep. I was thinking that my paycheck wouldn’t fix the car. I thought it day after day, and missed everything. Pink Rose to...
Under The Chestnuts
Soaring into the cobalt sky, Yamo’s basketball eclipses a huge harvest moon before crashing down through a chestnut tree. Spiky burrs, loosened by the circular assault, drop past Fay’s head. ...
Twilight Histories, A Monologue
Part 1 Winter ice and slippers. Instability on the black driveway. Well, there’s a reason they call them slippers. Slippery bed slippers. She should be slipping into bed. Or, determined as sh...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2012/twilight-histories-a-monologue/
A Group of Anorectics Take a Field Trip to the Supermarket
Each girl slings a basket on her elbow. Hollow crates dangle like unlit chandeliers. They get the heavy stuff first, full gallons of skim milk, and pace the aisles, trying to burn as much as they...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2012/a-group-of-anorectics-take-a-field-trip-to-the-supermarket/
Parataxis
Meg Matich is a student in Columbia University’s MFA– Poetry and Literary Translation program, where she focuses on German translation and delves into Slovak translation. Her first chapbo...
Devoted
You have the urge to pee during the Forty Hours Devotion. Think of something else, your mother would say, were she there, but the non-believer never comes to church. Church is your father’s de...
Limbo
Now that I am older, I play my part as though it mattered a little more. It doesn’t work of course. It never worked, though I have dreamed myself into all kinds of places, for example out west ...
Three Poems
Real Man Blues The field of big-barrel barbeques tried to be a churchyard the way he once tried to lace me down with lies. In the end, only one got what they were after. And only one of us sang, ...
Lovers, Carbon Monoxide Poisoning
‘Will the world end if we come together?’ ‘Baby, what kind of question is that?’ * She is up from California for Christmas and orange-faced above her parka. Fake Californian girl, laughin...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2012/lovers-carbon-monoxide-poisoning/
On A Barge
That Autumn I rented a barge in a secluded pool upstream from the mouth of the harbour, lost in there among the woods. I had an open stove in which I burned timber collected along the neglected w...
Your Nature
You say it’s funny how your breasts are gone but you remain. It was the same for your grandmother (who still lives), but your mother would not give them up and so gave up everything else. You...
Good Night
Occulophobia: The fear of nightfall. Edison. Prometheus. Lucifer. Saviors. Lightbulbs. Reedy fire. Those who convert, invert With steady hands. Sleep: the fear of being Awake. Finger, Switch. The...
In And Through The Cold
Pretend to be natives. The idea was absurd, a stroke of genius. Perfect timing, too. It was 1925, the year after the US granted citizenship to American Indians. We were sure the Alaska Natives wo...
The History of Us
The house was red tiles, flaked stucco, a palm tree to the side dropping fronds like huge dried fish. They flew a pirate flag there, and mowed their lawn into a peace sign until the University ma...
Encyclopedia Floridiana
Green Basilisk / Basiliscus plumifrons / Jesus lizard My roommate Frank finds the basilisk on one of his worksites and brings it home. He puts it in the snake tank, which he leaves on the patio, ...
There
There is a jasmine vine on the corner of 9th Ave. and 5th St. It weaves across a fence around a 1938 house that holds the vault of a former bank robber. You will find its combination scratched in...
In the Event of Nuclear War
How many have handed over their religions? Come empty fences come power-lines, TVs all promising the fall-out won’t make landfall. I’ve been in rooms full of people while they haunt themselve...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2012/in-the-event-of-nuclear-war/
The Hard Because
The crook of my neck: the hairline once made a perfect cursive M: you wept over the dishwater in the same sink you had once washed my infant body (the soft machinery): you the mother within my mo...
Restraining Order
I am sitting in the attic closet with the cobwebs and mothballs, holding my baby, her hiccups ceaseless as the paint can smashes through the window below and the diaper rash is getting worse and ...
To Ipswich
They sent me to London for a summit on Global Water Leakage. I lasted no time at all because feeling like a lame duck I soon began to sweat. We were in a convention centre, some stuffy four star ...
Greil Marcus Breaks Through The Doors
The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years by Greil Marcus PublicAffairs 2011 In the twenty-five minutes it takes to drive from Berkeley to San Francisco—in the spring of 2010—G...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2012/greil-marcus-breaks-through-the-doors/
Ladies! Gentlemen! Boys and Girls!
The Greatest Show by Michael Downs Louisiana State University Press 2012 Michael Downs is the son of a man who–as a three-year-old boy–did not attend the infamous Ringling Brothers and Ba...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2012/ladies-gentlemen-boys-and-girls/
What is the Sound of One Tone Droning?
Draw a Straight Line and Follow It: The Music and Mysticism of La Monte Young by Jeremy Grimshaw Oxford University Press 2012 Minimalism. Art’s 50-year-old movement. A force of stasis. Of rep...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2012/what-is-the-sound-of-one-tone-droning/
The Burn of the Everyday
Wild in the Plaza of Memory by Pamela Uschuk Wings Press 2012 Nature looms large in Pamela Uschuk’s Wild in the Plaza of Memory. In one poem alone, “In Dharamsala Among Tibetan Exiles,�...
Beauty in the Beast
The Map and the Territory by Michel Houellebecq Translated by Gavin Bowd Alfred A. Knopf 2011 I’m not going to write about Michel Houellebecq’s shocking public fight with his mother, nor...
Houses of Spirit
At Contrary Blog, former Guardian columnist Crista Cloutier is reviewing worship services and settings. Read about the Society of Friends, the London Spiritualist Mission, the Guild of Vergers, t...
Curl Up With One
In this issue, Contrary features reviews of books by Michel Houellebecq, Greil Marcus, Pamela Uschuk, Jeremy Grimshaw, and Michael Downs. Visit Contrary’s Index of Reviews or the individual lin...
Three Poems
Deception, Misread I pull gumdrop from gunpowder, catch Nazi in a list of thirty warning signs of menopause. I skim the pages of a journal take bisexual from bilingual, intersection from�...
Kiss My Annulus
Ringing phones start too many stories. Take this one for example. When it rings right at the mouth, we are forced to consider others that open this way – those crime novels, that translation...
The Extra Knot
It was me screaming in the reflection of Dr. Maxwell’s sunglasses saying “the kids! the knot! the rope!” and pulling on his sleeve trying to explain what he already knew- that there was an ...
Voodoo Sonnets
I Nothing happened— not my entire life. The punitive pale clay of the body enacted the hours the way the marrow of a bone sleeps inside its chamber. There were Novocain hills beyond the railroa...
An Eclipse
The cat had been sleeping in the doghouse. The day was like a cave after a lightning. Birth and death played on a see- saw and sight and night played hide and seek. Time had left no tracks. The g...
The Tarbouche Maker
When they entered they were not sure it was the right alley. They looked up to see scraps of sky between old dark beams like the ribs of a boat. Maybe it was covered once. “Do you think this is...
Home
She opens her eyes. She’d squeezed them closed, waiting for the voices to pass her by. As if closing them might allow her to disappear. It was a ritual she’d believed in when she was younger,...
The Self-Avoidant Biographer
A Book of Secrets: Illegitimate Daughters, Absent Fathers by Michael Holroyd 2011 Farrar, Straus & Giroux English biographer Sir Michael Holroyd has been bit bad by the Bloomsbury bug—that cliq...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2012/the-self-avoidant-biographer/
A Poetic Guidebook to Prague
From a Terrace in Prague: A Prague Poetry Anthology Edited by Stephan Delbos Litteraria Pragensia Books 2011 From a Terrace in Prague is an ambitious literary undertaking. Stephan Delbos, Cult...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2012/a-poetic-guidebook-to-prague/
To Boldly Go
Tales of the New World Sabina Murray Black Cat 2011 On the face of it, Sabina Murray’s latest collection of tales appears to take up where her PEN/Faulkner Award-winning collection, The Capr...
Harnessing Darkness
Other Heartbreaks Patricia Henley Engine Books 2011 The stories in Other Heartbreaks by Patricia Henley will change you. Now the thin girl who passes you coming out of a gas station restroom�...
Tom Waits Talks
Tom Waits on Tom Waits: Interviews and Encounters Edited by Paul Maher, Jr. Chicago Review Press 2011 Over Tom Waits’ long musical career, one thing has remained constant: “Vocabulary,” ...
A Novel of Moments
Greasewood Creek by Pamela Steele Counterpoint 2011 In her debut novel, Greasewood Creek, Pamela Steele draws heavily from the elements of poetry even as she weaves an emotionally complex story. ...
Yom Kippur
The sunlight didn’t break, we are broken, the word ‘broken’ is broken. ~ Yehuda Amichai Today, everything hurts, and I’m as close to god as I’ll ever come, or want to be. I try to ...
Time Stands Still
I sail in my dreams, I am dreaming of home. ~ Osama Abu Kabir, from Poem s from Guantanamo For a Casio, for the way its back case can ...
with all the bright lights on
the alarm clocks were the first to turn. you reached with morning pulleys at your eyes in the bone-colored light to slap at the clock that wasnt singing. figured you set it wrong and went to work...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2011/with-all-the-bright-lights-on/
The Rabbi of Seventy-Second Street
The Rabbi of Seventy-Second Street, a kabbalist, wore his hat inside out. He claimed this was not for mystical reasons, but simply so he could show himself to the world as he felt himself to be. ...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2011/the-rabbi-of-seventy-second-street/
The Garage Sale Daze Meditations
i Look at them, slumped in the corner there. Ears pounded and mouse-bitten, ragged legs askew. Rubber lips kissing cold cement. Even here, among the abandoned, they are twice forsaken: the coffee...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2011/the-garage-sale-daze-meditations/
I Am Large. I Contain Multitudes.
Bob Dylan: Like a Complete Unknown by David Yaffe Yale University Press 2011 The day after John F. Kennedy’ s inauguration, fifty years ago, Robert Zimmerman, of Hibbing, Minnesota, who had rec...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2011/i-am-large-i-contain-multitudes/
What I recommend: This novel
The Call by Yannick Murphy Harper Perennial 2011 What I Read: The Call by Yannick Murphy Favorite Quote: “Because light takes a while to travel, what we’re seeing is always in the past.” Ho...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2011/what-i-recommend-this-novel/
The Ultimate Mashup
Invisible Mink by Jessie Janeshek Iris Press 2010 Jessie Janeshek’s Invisible Mink is a collection worth devoting your time to and, in fact, one which can only be properly enjoyed as a project....
The Devil’s in the Details
Volt by Alan Heathcock Graywolf Press 2011 Ain’t nothing but trouble for the fictional town of Krafton, Somewhere Prairie, USA. In fact, any one of the searing tragedie s or subtle terrors depi...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2011/the-devils-in-the-details/
An Inclusive Poetic World
Underdog by Katrina Roberts University of Washington Press 2011 While reading Katrina Roberts’s fourth book of poetry, Underdog, I felt as if I had travelled into the inner workings of the a...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2011/an-inclusive-poetic-world/
The Twin
She does everything you choose not to and returns each night while you sleep, ever loyal. When you are alone, buried in thoughts like warm sand, then you feel her there. Whatever you want to give...
Anchor in the Sea Change
Contrary Blog Anchor David Alm is a journalist and a professor of journalism in New York. At Contrary Blog he h as been pursuing changes in education, media, reading, music, film and more as the...
Love Like All the Stars in the Sky
My mother told me just this morning (Friday, June 17, 2011) that I should write something about how my affliction with cancer is really an affliction that the whole family has in some way. I beli...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2011/love-like-all-the-stars-in-the-sky/
Two Poems
Tools Hammer and hacksaw, vise and screwdriver have the hard gaze and slow heartbeat of reptiles. I am visiting the hardware store with my father. In a wooden drawer stained by dirty fingers a se...
Vaucluse
Virid is the spring that snakes through our garden dappled with sun-shade (snake-skin) surrounded by choked-up laurels and strange purple flowers that waver in the water like reflected...
My father had this girlfriend
My father had this girlfriend. Her name was Gemma Fay. She looked like Mia Farrow. I think. I only saw her once and she was naked then. Gemma Fay was my father’s first girlfriend and, therefore...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2011/my-father-had-this-girlfriend/
Ballad of a bumble bee trapped in honey
That dizzying last summer we explored the one billion possibilities of bumblebee assassination. We learned lacing the curb with Dr. Pepper to lure them under a false pretense of sweetness was eas...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2011/ballad-of-a-bumble-bee-trapped-in-honey/
Strange birds
The cloud cleared and the sun broke through. Exotic birds with warm colours, probably from Africa, landed on the back wall, as light as air and yet strong enough to cross deserts and oceans. I’...
Single Life #18
Then she says, of e.e. cummings, that when one resorts to numbering poems instead of titling them, it’s clear that each is merely the passage of time between tumblers of whiskey, the most recen...
Virgin Mary
I am a garden locked up. Listen here. I am not interested in being threaded through a needle or woven into your tapestry. The eye is too fine. My kneecaps are too wide. I am a spring enclosed. In...
The past is present
The Bird Sisters Rebecca Rasmussen Crown Publishers 2011 When they were teenagers, Milly hoped to marry and have children, while Twiss hoped to stand on the Continental Divide and “to be the...
The non-expert expert
Otherwise Known As the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews 1989-2010 Geoff Dyer 2011 Graywolf No writer I know occupies as many rooms in the storied compound of arts criticism as Geoff D...
For better and for worse
And Yet They Were Happy Helen Phillips Leapfrog Press 2011 In her first book, And Yet They Were Happy, Helen Phillips doesn’t begin at the beginning, or even, as some writers do, at the end....
Poems that bridge rational and mystical
Northerners Seth Abramson New Issues Poetry & Prose 2011 Certain poems evoke a feeling of turning inward and focusing a scope on particulars, so that the world seems to stop, and the leaf, the...
Separation and more separation
You Know When the Men Are Gone Siobhan Fallon Amy Einhorn Books 2011 When war zone landscapes flash across the news, some of us, safe in our living rooms, worry about American soldiers oversea...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2011/separation-and-more-separation/
Teaching caged birds to sing
A Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet Eavan Boland Carcanet Press Ltd (UK) and W.W. Norton & Company (USA) 2011 A woman poet, according to Eavan Boland, needs to resolve her relation ...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2011/teaching-caged-birds-to-sing/
How far from nothing
In the Spring issue of Contrary Magazine, Rafael Torch wrote about returning to lead a high-school classroom after chemo therapy. His fight has continued, and he’s been keeping us posted—in h...
Summer reading
In this issue, Contrary features reviews of books by Rebecca Rasmussen, Geoff Dyer, Helen Phillips, Seth Abramson, Siobhan Fallon, and Eavan Bol and. Visit Contrary’ s Index of Review s or t...
Three Poems: The Soldiers
The Soldiers Today, soldiers will be born in white hospitals or beside drainage ditches, on lonely farms or in stalled cars, their mothers and fathers transformed into makers of soldiers, whet...
Three Poems: What the Classics Teach
What the Classics Teach For thousands of years, they have searched fresh parchment or yellowed pages, human eyes bright with youth or bleary from too many nights reading by dim candle or lampligh...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2011/what-the-classics-teach-temple-cone/
Three Poems: Burning Sappho
Burning Sappho “you burn me” ~ Sappho fr.38, trans. Anne Carson First, understand no one felt regret. This tenth Muse, whose limbs loosened at a touch, melting swift as tallow into tears, san...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2011/burning-sappho-temple-cone/
Sophomore
Begin: today you are born, the universe is born, whatever that is is born and has its purpose. Flowers are born, sea life and mountain are born, the positions of the moon are born, the deer clums...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2011/sophomore-nick-courtright/
A Lawnmower’s One of the Babies I’d Have
(after Lorine Niedecker) In the high weeds, I’d bite. Snap the little sticks, bash a nest in the dying grass. That would be me, bearing down among daisies and the branched broomrape. No pity fo...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2011/lawnmower-babies-hannah-craig/
If for days on end…
February. All night a storm raged like World War Three. Thunder and lightning rent the heavens. Wind shook the foundations and rain flooded the chutes. At first light, tankers, trawlers and freig...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2011/if-for-days-on-end-edward-mc-whinney/
Red
Then, there was the next time, the last time, the one time when things became grand enough to unfurl all sense of belonging, a hearty red ribbon, carried behind, blowing in deep ripples, red, yes...
Paging Stevie Cavallero
My co-workers greeted me in the faculty lounge of the Las Vegas private school where I teach American literature with hugs and slaps on the back, as if I’d just finished a long, grueling race, ...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2011/paging-stevie-cavallero-rafael-torch/
Lullaby for Galatea
I never meant for you to wake up. What I wanted and prayed for was not what I meant to happen. Your friction-warmed surface, your curves my own hands carved and defined, your medium too rich and ...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2011/lullaby-for-galatea-r-gatwood/
Searching for who we are
Under the Mercy Trees by Heather Newton Harper 2011 Buy this book I once stood at my grandfather’s knee, watching him do tricks with rocks. Later I backpacked by myself in France. I married at ...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2011/under-the-mercy-trees-heather-newton/
Motherhood, disenthralled
Bring Down the Little Birds by Carmen Giménez Smith 2010 The University of Arizona Press Buy this book This slim memoir is soaked in the partum-based worry many mothers-to-be endure. The birth y...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2011/bring-down-the-little-birds-carmen-gimenez-smith/
Bright and shiny life
While Mortals Sleep: Unpublished Short Fiction by Kurt Vonnegut Delacorte Press 2011 Buy this book In his 1997 book Timequake, Kurt Vonnegut wrote, “a plausible mission of artists is to make pe...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2011/while-mortals-sleep-kurt-vonnegut/
Something thin in her pocket
Talismans by Sybil Baker C & R Press 2010 Buy this book In Sybil Baker’s linked story collection, Talismans, readers simultaneously experience the emotional and geographic territory of Elise�...
Language and sexuality in an uneven weave
Speech Acts by Laura McCullough Black Lawrence Press 2010 Buy this book In her poem “What Can Happen in the Dunes,” Laura McCullough writes: My body was fertile, then not, then fecund, aga...
https://contrarymagazine.com/2011/laura-mccullough-speech-acts/
Older Archives
• 2010 Archives • 2003-2009 Archives
https://contrarymagazine.com/2011/contrary-magazine-archives-2003-2010/
More Stories by Edward Mc Whinney
Edward Mc Whinney lives in Cork, Ireland. He’s neither all that young nor all that old. He has been a regular contributor to Contrary, writing stories of Irish life and Spanish exile. This is a...
Allegory
The Journal of Unpopular Discontent
The Empty Armchair
The Journal of Unpopular Discontent
Darwin: Three Poems
The Journal of Unpopular Discontent
Travelogue
The Journal of Unpopular Discontent
Plum Island
I don’t know his name. He never said it. Nor did I mention mine. I’ve seen him here before, this hour of the day, the sun sinking, ebb tide, and on this same spot on Plum Island, where he s...
Ascenscion
When he met me, he stood so close to the lunch table that I had to look straight up him, as one might look up the contours of an overhanging cliff, which meant that he had to look straight down a...