Miles pressed the up button and brushed a fuzz from his suit coat. Executives and their associates flowed through the monotone, white-collar hum of business,…
The memory was painful. Vivid, so perfectly forged that merely to unsheathe it meant pain. Little things could draw it out. The smell of wet lumber, freshly cut. Maybe a combination of words or a strange pattern of falling leaves. Try as one might, it was an experience that could not be contained. Like water falling, it would find a path through, no matter how hard you worked to stop it. This time it was a name.
I begin to know the streets, Spy tunnels
And their depth.
The pavement where homeless men decry passerby
For lonely cigarettes.
you who carry the world in your palm
the weighty equivalence of Alexandria’s wisdom
inside a slender electronic case
may never know
Every month, The Reading Room showcases a short story, or excerpts of a book, from some of the greatest writers the world has ever seen.
This is a collaborative poem by one American and two Australian poets that explores Gerard Manley Hopkins’s philosophical themes found both in his poetry and in the personal struggles of his inner life.
It was New Year’s Day at eight in the morning when I looked out the window, hung over and blurry-eyed, to see my neighbour, Ivy…
Homing “So, you like it?” Navin asked Puja as they got into the car. “Mansfield Park…” Puja tossed the name into the air. “It is…
I stepped into the living room of my Uncle Bernie’s modest bungalow near Islington and Bloor. The banana yellow walls of the quaint room gave…
we are on our travels with
the remains of conversations we almost had,
promises cracked through the middle,
wrapped in the cloth that blinds us
The moon’s not yet quite there, and the buildings are hideous,
at most a woman on the corner, or a student lost in sartre and making the world’s riddles