a poem by jeffery conway

A poem from a poet I love who spells his name Jeffery, the same way my name is spelled!


Formal French Garden


Boxwoods arrive en masse. Biofeedback
unravels the high poodle caliber
of these verdant plants, delivered at crack
of dawn to transform latest high water-
mark of Cottage Street’s remodels. Fortune
smiles on the new owners: magenta
hollyhocks (ripped out) make way for cartoon
Versailles-esque yard, complete with aroma
of royalty gone to seed. A balmy
eve reveals teak furniture lit by globes
of therapeutic candles. Queens calmly
chat behind just-planted privet hedge—nope,
cackles cut into night—a resurgence
of gossip, bitchiness, utter nonsense.


Jeffery Conway is the author of The Album That Changed My Life and co-author of Phoebe 2002: An Essay in Verse. His recently completed manuscript is "Showgirls: The Movie in Sestinas."

a poem by morgan parker

Quiet Alcohol


It is our usual holiday.
You ask if you can trouble me for a glass
of whiskey. Someone asks me offhand
about the hate in my spine. I say,
Fuck babies, and my mother
didn’t like the flowers I bought her
and do you see what I mean?
My mother is always a different person.
These are standard answers. But lately
in pale light I examine bruises
I hope are from you, teach myself mechanics
of clear evenings and I am
steeped in insults for you.
I want quiet alcohol
untouched by light and fingertips,
settled safely under half-moon,
crests dilating with slow breath.
There are no feelings here
and I do not want to go home. Soon
we will be underwater, life forms
in air pockets. And I do not trust
this place to scoop us up, teach us
to move, hips following current,
arms like pillars expanding and stretching
under highway glow. You know
I always cry at holidays.


Morgan Parker lives with her dog, Braeburn, in New York City, where she is an MFA candidate in poetry at NYU. She holds a BA in Anthropology and Creative Writing from Columbia University. She is the recipient of the Arthur E. Ford Poetry Prize, and her work has been featured in The Columbia Review, The Blue & White Magazine, and on Scatteredrhymes.com.

interview with ryan quinn

Ryan Quinn's debut novel The Fall brought me back to the awkwardness of university life in the same way Curtis Sittenfeld's Prep did. Both books have a keen sense of the banal and the thrilling, life-changing moments of that time. Set at a small college, The Fall follows three students—Casey, a jock; Ian, a film buff discovering his sexuality; and Haile, a talented musician. The novel successfully moves in and out of their point-of-views with compelling first person narratives. I asked Ryan Quinn a few questions about his writing process and thoughts on his novel.




When and how did you begin writing The Fall?

RQ: I started writing the first chapters nearly five years ago. The motivation was a convergence of a few things. The characters came first. They just kept surfacing in my consciousness, I think because their story was interesting to me and yet I didn't see characters like them being portrayed in novels or movies. About the same time I was writing more and more articles for various websites and realizing how much I loved the challenge of crafting a narrative. Also, I read a few bad, very commercially successful books and it made me think, "Hey, I can do this!"

You are originally from Alaska and went to school in Utah. What was it like growing up in these areas? Did you feel any personal connection to Wasilla during the 2008 election when the town was suddenly on a national stage?

RQ: I grew up in Wasilla. It's not a big town, which I think makes it a wonderful place to grow up in. But I never thought of is as a political place. The whole Palin obsession has been surreal. I don't think there is anything to take away from it. It's just a weird coincidence. Maybe one takeaway is that I wish Tina Fey had been my mayor instead.

People usually wince when I tell them I went to college in Utah. I have to clarify that it was for skiing reasons—I was on the ski team at the University of Utah—not religious reasons. But the truth is that the Mormon influence didn't really impact my everyday life. I hung out with a lot of other student-athletes, many of whom had been recruited from other states or countries and weren't Mormon. And Salt Lake City has a fantastic gay community. It was the perfect place for me to be at that time.

I love how the title relates to many different aspects within the novel. Can you discuss that a little?

RQ: The story takes place during the fall semester at this college, which is the obvious reference. But on a more interesting level, there is a painting called The Fall of Man that figures into the plot, and this painting has some themes that echo the plot of the book. Also, some of the characters experience what you might call "a fall," but I don't want to spoil anything! I knew the novel was working when I started to discover that all these themes and layers existed within the story—at that they felt very organic, not forced. The title kind of ties them all together.



I thought the shifts between point of view was pulled off well. The voices of the three main characters felt believable to me. Were there any difficulties in writing in different voices? Did you always picture the novel to be set up that way?

RQ: Yes and yes. I was fascinated by the idea that we each kind of take for granted our own perceptions of reality—when I think what is probably happening more often is that we have hilariously different perceptions of the same situation. I wanted to explore this by structuring the book as three very intimate, first-person narratives so that certain scenes would be seen through all three of the main characters. Honestly, I didn't know if it would work, and at first I was very self-conscious that it would come off as a gimmick. But I think I knew it was working when it became not just a way of telling the story, but a key part of the story and the characters' journeys.

Attempting to channel a female voice was a challenge for me. So was making each character's voice distinct enough so that the reader could tell them apart. A lot of smart people told me it was too ambitious. Usually I'm very coachable in that way, but in this case I had a vision for how it was supposed to work and I just kept revising and revising until I got there. When the book was published I was still worried that people would quit after thirty pages because the alternating narratives was confusing. I was relieved when I started to get feedback from people who said they rarely read books and they read it in a day.

The use of point of view reminded me a bit of the structuring of Michael Cunningham's A Home at the End of the World. Are there any particular authors who have had an influence on you?

RQ: I did read A Home at the End of the World before writing The Fall, as well as Bret Easton Ellis's The Rules of Attraction and a great book called Sea of Tranquility by Paul Russell. Those are the most obvious, transparent influences. But I think we are what we read, and everything we read—whether we liked the book or not—seeps into the gears in our brain that are grinding out any story we're writing.

Since you are an athlete, how did your personal experiences in the athletic world lend to crafting The Fall?

RQ: I was a competitive cross-country skier in college and since then I've run a few marathons. Writing a novel is incredibly similar to training for an endurance sport. You have to put in a lot of hours day after day. There aren't bursts of glory to sustain you. And it's lonely; not in a sad way, just in a literal way. You have to take a long view and be competitive with yourself in order to keep going back and trying to make it clearer—better. It can't be a whim; it's a mindset.

Did anything surprise you while writing the novel? Did you have days where you felt you related to certain characters more than others?

RQ: Absolutely. Actually, one of the things that surprised me the most was how closely I was able to relate to Haile and Casey. I guess I expected to relate to Ian, but the other two were a surprise. Maybe it's because the point-of-view narratives are so intimate, and when you drill down to that level we're all sort of dealing in universal emotions even if what we express to the world seems more unique.

I felt a kinship with Ian who is a film buff and trying to figure out his sexuality and what he wants to do with his life. Do you think his favorite film, Lawrence of Arabia, has any particular significance?

RQ: Yeah, you can draw some parallels, though the relevance of that particular film was only in the back of my mind when I was writing the book. I guess the larger theme of the book is "the search for meaning," which is introduced in the Art History class, but it's also something each character explores on his/her own. I think in Ian's case, he's drawing those cinematic parallels in his mind, even if I didn't make that explicit in the story.

Are you working on writing anything new at the moment?

RQ: I am. I have a rough almost-draft of a new novel. It needs a lot of work, and I'm excited to return to it with fresh eyes and start revising and rewriting. I'm afraid to say more because that'd be like showing you my new apartment before I've gutted it and had all the fixtures redone!

On a scale from 1 to 4 stars, how many stars do you give your day?

RQ: Four. Definitely four. Have you read the news lately? This world is nuts. I'm happy to be here.


Ryan Quinn grew up in Alaska. After graduating from the University of Utah, where he was an NCAA Champion and All-American college athlete, he worked in book publishing for five years in New York City. He now lives in Los Angeles. The Fall is his first novel.

You can purchase the paperback here and also the kindle edition of The Fall here.

a poem by jerome murphy

Two Masters


The baby would drive us crazy.
Just listen to that dog outside your door
while we nestle in the chill,

our bodies in love. Only pinched nerves
whine so high. No doubt I would savor
the torment of something sentient.

Once, in the unbalanced state
called childhood, I harassed
a cousin’s caged hamster for its

absent-eyed look. It was fretless,
overfed. I wanted to constrict
that little emperor’s belly. How is it

we call ourselves human, when moved
by glandular hungers that make
such menageries—body lust,

money lust, the lust of perception
for limits of sense. Our open yard
of free will has one rickety gate,

a falling-down fence: all that’s missing
is a sign with the Rottweiler’s name.



Jerome Murphy is a New York-based freelancer and administrator in the Creative Writing Program at NYU. He is a member of the Wilde Boys poetry group, and currently loves Szymborska and Valzhyna Mort.

two poems by cynthia atkins

Face Book

It should come as no shock, our faces
as books, our faces the envy of
broken down clocks—Right-brain, left brain—
          Let us be plugged in
at every turn, in every orifice.
This is our body! This is our office!
          Staple every button-hole
that is latchkey and sad. Credentials culled,
there’s no turning back now.
We’re here to be cut and pasted.
Prepare us to be a billboard
          blessed by the waste
of a flightless bird. All the toasters lost
the tender prints left from a lover’s
scorched breakfast. (Too much work?)
So stack our shelves with a library
          of perfect smiles.
Salacious minds need routine, packaged
as shiny shrink-wrapped trinkets.
Screens screaming for sex kittens
and war porn—takes the place
          of breakfast and love?
Honk if you’re lonely and your wardrobe
resembles a caption, wearing white
in winter—such poor taste!
          Don’t fret, an underling
took the place of your former self.
Pupils plaited and distal, the story
and the people got ransacked out—
exchanged for a remote page
          of faceless doubt.








Letter to Metaphor


Soundless as a disc on a dot of snow
   -Emily Dickinson


It goes without saying, there’s something
for everyone. Remember the slut
of the multi-purpose room,
         legs spread and bearing
the burden for everyone—?
         Lipstick put on
for all the wrong reasons,
and all dolled-up for what
the bed of roses stole.
         A note was penned
by simile’s hand—your first cousin
allergic at the ersatz country house,
flirting with images and glyphs.
         Ask for subtlety, you’ll get
a mixed strip-tease every time.
No consequence, no punishment,
like when you helped write
         cheat notes on the inside
of my hand—the same naked hand
that braided hair, slipped off a coat—
traded in sex for a prayer.




-"Face Book" originally appeared in BigCity Lit, Fall 2010.

-"Letter to Metaphor" originally apeared in The Broome Review, Spring 2011


Cynthia Atkins received an MFA from Columbia University’s School of the Arts. Her first collection of poems, Psyche’s Weathers (Wordtech, 2007) was recently featured on Verse Daily, and reviewed in Poets' Quarterly, Winter 2011. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in many journals including, American Letters & Commentary, BOMB, The Broome Review, Caketrain, Cold Mountain Review, Denver Quarterly, Harpur Palate, Inertia, The Journal, New York Quarterly, Seneca Review, Sou’Wester, and Valparaiso Review, and was nominated for a 2011 Pushcart Prize. Atkins teaches creative writing and literature, most recently, at Roanoke College, and worked formerly as the assistant director for the Poetry Society of America in NYC. She now resides on the Maury River of Rockbridge County, VA with her family.

a poem by lawrence kaplun

On Broadway


This row of payphones on Broadway,
beside the door of Metro Diner

(beaming florescent light),
not exactly a row, only two of them, a pair

of lovers, broken. The sign--
"doesn't work".

Cracked lip of receiver,
the part where you hold it

to your ear. Gaping wound,
pieces of wire sticking out like a brush.

Want to hold it in the crook
of my shoulder, and make the call--

whoever it is I need to call, maybe
someone to tell me this place

where we walk (or I walk
alone), isn't really broken.

Listen to the fire truck
roaring, not like a phone,

but it keeps ringing down the street,
then everywhere forgets where it has gone.

The fire of these phone wires sticking out,
the booth where no one (it seems) is hungry.


Lawrence Kaplun was born in Ohio and raised in Los Angeles. He received his B.A. in English from San Francisco State University. He has attended the Squaw Valley Community of Writers Poetry Program, and in 2011, will attend the New York State Summer Writers Institute. His poems have appeared in Limp Wrist Magazine and The Gay & Lesbian Review. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

three poems by gregory laynor

April is National Poetry Month. You can sign up for the Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day on poets.org

This month, I'm going to try to post a poem-a-day as well.


Here are three from Gregory Laynor.



From the Deleted Poems of Gregory Laynor

Will you put me in your diorama
Will you tie me to your shoe
Googly eyed stick figure




From the Deleted Poems of Gregory Laynor

Are we having fun counting sausages for beans
Asking Ronald Reagan for a Jasper Johns
Boys in bowties asking about our fun




From the Deleted Poems of Gregory Laynor

As every schoolboy knows
The best of all possible worlds
Leaves much to be desired



Gregory Laynor is a poet working on a PhD at the University of Washington in Seattle. He previously studied & taught at Temple University in Philadelphia. His reading of Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans appears on UbuWeb & he does a blog at academicpoetry.com.