Magazine
A Public Space
No. 22
"Everyone who is alive has a ghost inside them, don't they?" –Kelly Link's New Boyfriend; Jamel Brinkley's Lucky Man; fiction from Kathmandu by Prawin Adhikari; John Haskell remembers George Trow; Julia Cooke participates in the Parable Conference; new fiction by Garth Greenwell and Anna Noyes; poems by Maria d'Arezzo, Caroline Knox, Kevin Prufer, and others; and introducing Andrea Maturana.
Table of Contents
Poetry
Out of Context
You must understand / My simple perception— / You know well you were living / Distant from life—
Fragments taken from the late fourteenth century masterpiece of medieval English mysticism, The Cloud of the Unknowing
Fiction
The New Boyfriend
She puts two fingers on his lips. She takes a breath and holds it, like she’s about to jump off a bridge into very deep water. Well, she is.
Fiction
Interiors
While Villagrán waited on the other side of the curtain for her to get undressed, he began to hope that there was something truly unusual wrong.
Translated by Heather Cleary
Fiction
Treelaw
“Doesn’t it feel like I don’t weigh a thing,” I said, and he said, “Feels like I’m holding nothing at all.”
Fiction
A Lucky Man
With any two people one would get the brunt of it, and time had hit him worse than any beating he'd ever seen in the ring.
Feature
A Man on the Grass
Their power is rooted not in their beauty but in the sense of inclusion they offer, a sense of inclusion that, for some people, isn’t as important as truth.
Poetry
Two Poems
It would not surprise me to find I am dead— / as my soul is full of sweet things / I never found in life.
Translated from the Italian by Olivia E. Sears
Poetry
Give Pause
Before we knew / what pleasure meant / we were multiplying, / going forth / into surrounding space / until all space / was pain.
Poetry
Difficult Evening
Their job is to write the placecards, so at the head of the table / they are putting Gilbert Osmond, and honorably on his right / they seat Margot Macomber.
Poetry
[A Sounding at the Ear]
A sounding at the ear. And a ringing at the doorstep. Look, she said, a sounding at my hair, and a laughing in the footsteps.
Poetry
Two Poems
Ripped from the earth like weeds / we clutch at our names, / we do not know how / this loneliness has found us.
Translated from the Italian by Charif Shanahan
Poetry
In the Mansion of Supersonic Dreams
Tonight I stand under the shower’s blue stoplight / for nine hundred years. Tallying the centuries, / each number a chaser, surviving only until the next / pale digit takes its place.
Poetry
Harbingers of the Deaths of Parrots
Perhaps the songs they sang for us / were not those we’d have wanted to hear, / but who among us can, with a clean conscience, / say of himself that what matters to him / is what others listen to.
Translated from the Polish by Benjamin Paloff
Poetry
Sundowning
An empty all-white room with drapeless windows / as winter spills its math across the sills / where nothing suffers, that’s where / there’s nothing left to misremember / or forget.
Poetry
Assorted Fictions
Rigor is no longer involved. Peeling back / reveals two discrete compartments, adjoining.
Poetry
Two Poems
I am not gigantic and I don’t keep my head down—like / the now-extinct elephant bird.
Poetry
Wild Spring
Because we were young / our picnic / Was hard-boiled eggs & black coffee in a flask.
Poetry
True Crime
The half-plastered ladies in tennis whites / at the taped-off perimeter / whispered among themselves, how sad.
Feature
The Art of Participation
To feel fully seen, period, is powerful; to feel seen by another person in something that calls itself a work of art is ever more so.
Fiction
Mentor
I remembered the certainty I had had, hours before, of my own competence, the pleasure I had taken in the solace I could give.
Fiction
The Messiah
When someone much weaker than you confronts a brute much stronger than you and fights to the death in defense of an ideal, something gives inside: you become a bit of a coward.
Subscribe to A Public Space
New subscriptions start with A Public Space No. 31, and include three issues of the magazine.
Subscriber benefits include
- Access to the magazine's online archive, with over a decade of award-winning work
- Exclusive offers and discounts