Poet Deema Shehabi talks about writing as a Palestinian exile, and about inspiration as a muse that can be slain, the many moons in her writing, and blending strangeness with familiarity. more »

I have become a turned chair, a chair that sits pretty in the corner, a piece of furniture, ignored. I am somebody’s ghost, haunting preferred to a holding, I am no longer tactile, invisible. I am a headless flower, dried out in a scum filled vase; I have become next week’s mulch, unbelievable. What has become of me? more »

here lies a man who every time he took a walk after dark in his neighborhood always and without fail asked himself why don’t you go for a walk every single night of your life and what’s keeping you from doing this one simple lovely thing more »

“I love you, Frankie,” Jade says. I tell her I love her back. Neither of us believes it but it sure feels good to pretend we do. more »

Do you know what it is to “flee”? Perhaps not, since all of your ilk are transfixed by screens and it’s doubtless difficult to animate a first-class flee, though I suppose some brainy little git is even now adjusting his quadrants and trying. You have no range yet, nor do you have the historical reach essential to the finer aspects of theatrical flight. Flouncing you do well enough. I’ve admired your overblown, hand-to-forehead imitation of Jo March’s triumph of overacting. The... more »

William Donoghue goes inside the mind of a hardened pedophile in this vintage short story from Fringe's first year. more »

Brian Nicolet looks at Dunstan Thompson and Tamura Ryuichi, two masters left to collect dust in the basement of the 20th century until The Unsung Masters Series came along. more »

I dreamt that it was morning and you said, as if it was no big thing, “Hey, kid, why don’t you take the penis today? I’ve got a lot to do, so I won’t even really notice it’s gone, and it might be fun for you.” “This is what I love about you,” my dream self said to the you in my dream. “Nobody else would ever think to be that generous.” And I meant it, as both my selves. Ultimately, this is a dream about your generosity. “Okay, then. Let me keep it till after my... more »

Tim and I were in bed together when he saw the spoon. I’d accidentally left the closet open, I noticed, at the same moment he said, “What’s that?” and I knew exactly what he was referring to more »

She says, “Don’t touch that bird or else the mother will never come back,” but I am already holding the baby bird cupped in my hands like my own beating heart. The tiny feet scritching my palms. I carry it home as carefully as a bomb and then my mother finds a box and a dishrag and the bird scrunches into the corner, away from the upside-down lid I have filled with water, away from my finger. “I’ll take good care of you,” I tell it. When we get home from the beach, the sun comes... more »

A call for radical formatting: Put a well-loved poem on some nice cardstock and give it—or trade it, or sell it—to a friend. Fringe Editor Anna Lena Phillips, on why we need broadsides and other visual embodiments for poetry now more than ever. more »

There wasn’t much in the hut besides themselves and Amelia Earhart, and they couldn’t bear to look at one another in the eye. more »

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She said, “A tall skinny man drove a knife into his body more than once.” She looked up at bright lights. They were not stars. They were not watching over. more »

Late one Saturday afternoon last October, I found myself standing in a Gonzales, Texas, rodeo arena talking politics with a man named Cary, the membership director of a group called the Texas Nationalist Movement. Cary’s focus was on secession – or independence, as he preferred to call it. Having spent the past hour helping lead a rally calling for just that goal, he had now turned to me, the skeptic with a notepad, and launched into the hard facts of why Texas’ freedom from the... more »

The Publisher/Editor of Cooper Dillon Books talks about poetical collaborations, the underrated virtue of humility, and the need for community. more »