Slow Guillotine
“It’s so easy to be right next to something and never experience it.” The sentence comes about a fourth of the way through Teo Rivera-Dundas’ debut novel and winner of the 2026 Barbara DiBernard Prize in Fiction, Slow Guillotine, and encapsulates a key theme of the book: adjacence. What …
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Working Waterfront
Winner of the 2025 Maine Postmark Poetry Contest, held in conjunction with the Belfast Poetry Festival. We argue, at the end of the workday, about which one of us smells the worst and you always win – you, smelling like the backside of low tide, after a day …
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Every Creeping Thing
This is a poem on hierarchy. Or history. Or anoles, live ones, four-fingered feet spread as if braced for impact. Or anoles, dead ones, flattened like bloody bookmarks on sidewalks. To creep upon the earth means to be ruled over—but once there was a soldier by the name of …
Read MoreLetter from the Co-Editor, 12.1
Dear Fellow Readers and Writers, Like many rural Mainers, I have a garden. My garden is fenced, so my dogs can roam freely (without harassing wildlife), and plants can grow without being overgrazed (by that same wildlife). A fence is a container, and like all containers, it necessarily distinguishes what …
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Thirst
What is your mother’s favorite drink? The hospice nurse asks me this over the phone. She doesn’t know that I call my mother my “birth” mother, that I was her second child birthed but not raised, given up for adoption when I was an infant. “Mother” without the extra …
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A Confession
After Czeslaw Milosz Lord, I loved the first days of Boston winter and walks through Copps Hill where the graves stick black and crooked like rotted teeth. Also the man, or his blue eyes, the way their color thinned like melting ice when he got stoned. That he was twenty …
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Things That Wait
The morning began the way most of them did, with small weights distributed in familiar places. A cup set down on the table left a faint ring of warmth that cooled gradually. A spoon tapped twice against its rim. Someone crossed the kitchen, and the floorboards offered their usual …
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The First
The Brothers are old, and there are four of them now instead of five. This makes it easier to deal a round of pusoy dos, which is one way they find comfort in their loss. When they sit down at their table and start to shuffle the cards, one …
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Fast and Bright and Hurtful
Lorna wore smoked glasses despite the night and kept taking them off only to put them back on. “It’s funny how old grapes make you feel. All warm and gooey.” She twisted the radio’s knob until a popular boy band came on. She adored Ricky Martin, ‘N Sync too. …
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