For those few seconds I could feel everything that had happened to me and everything that would happen to me riding through my blood, overlaid in a kind of thick textured darkness behind my closed eyes and I felt my adolescent loneliness as fully as I ever would. I was filled with my lonely breath. I was the god of my solitary self, alone there in it.
Read MoreYou could drop a grand piano
from a fifth story window
and smash the box to bits
but that would also smash the girl.
Nothing living would be left.
In the far corner of the desert, south of the Barry Goldwater Air Force Base, deep in the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, eleven miles from the border, they found a Bible, a tube of lip balm, and a set of footprints. This wasn’t what they were looking for.
Read MoreWe settled into ourselves and the talk. I remember
less of what we said than how it felt.
Between us, stilled spoons and glasses, each
with a glint of candlelight, bending slightly,
as we joined in the purr and put of ideas: listen,
and respond, a back and forth in which we joined.
If you have grown up with lack, you will act like Enyinne, who has become an expert in carrying her grief with her so light it doesn’t show to the world. Those years of bread so stale its prices are reduced because it smells like paper and tastes like dust, but that’s all her mother can afford. Those years of wearing slippers for so long they thin out and the heat from the asphalt burns her soles. Those years of washing and wadding up rags to use again, because where does she expect the money for a sanitary pad to fall from? The sky?
Read More—my grandma doesn’t know. My grandma watches
the news. We hear a woof and I woof back—my grandma thinks
I’m dead//talking like a dog//coyote-hungry—I can’t find any money so
I work for it in the night.
We took a month off from TSR Online. Four weeks without new content. In the interest of transparency, this hiatus was for the following reasons:
lack of submissions
general grief and uncertainty about everything
That’s it, really. But four weeks has made us realize that neither of those conditions are changing anytime soon. So! Going forward, for the next couple of months we’ll be publishing a story, poem, or essay every Wednesday at 10 a.m. from past issues of The Southampton Review. These pieces have never been available online before and we’re excited to make the work of our contributors more visible.
We’ll also be opening submissions exclusively for TSR Online beginning April 15, and we’ll keep them open for the first 500 submissions we receive. You can find more information about our submission guidelines for this special reading period here.
Stay safe and well out there.
All our best,
The Editors
Read MoreOn the second weekend of November I bought a small bottle of vodka and coffee liquor to make White Russians. Soup boiled forgotten on the stove as my husband and I poured each other refreshers, spilling cream across the counter. The heater in our house was broken and the girls’ socks hung half off their feet as they cut construction paper at the dining room table. Slivers of paper drifted down to join the dog hair on the floor.
Read MoreIn zombie movies there’s always a couple who fuck
one last time, drink some wine and just give up.
This is the only reason I can think of
to fall in love again. On first dates men often ask
how you would rather die,
I kid you not, drowning or fire.
They want to know my body even as it’s destroyed
by my imagination. The world is burning
and we can’t stop saying the word tender.
We pass a massive plaster cow perched above a party store. We pass an American flag obliterating the landscape, then an ice cream shop. I want to wonder with you what the cow means. But you are not a morning person and I love you.
Read MoreI came to Xinjiang to see someone from before whom I anticipated I wouldn’t find. I’d read in a gawking travel publication that there was a single gay bar in Urumqi where the drag queens dress as Uyghur women in traditional outfits and spin like dervishes to poppy Central Asian music. Maybe he’d be there. But it wasn’t likely.
Read MoreTo be birth marked on arrival to wade through
Sulfurous waves is no easy burden.
Set your eyes to the horizon and inhale.
When the starving sea groans and its monsters leap,
Hold fast to those songs that stem from the ocean’s depths.
Do not waver, sing!
We pretended to know the answers and kept our fingers crossed, sometimes behind our backs. We ignored it when we knew you were up to something. We debated politics. We got pissed when you didn’t fill up the gas tank.
Read MoreAt high tide in April, we caught the sun’s sleeve
after school in our underwear—how the water
chilled our brains into a mushy orchard, numbing
our toes and fingers purple-yellow like Mardi-Gras
confetti. I clutched our mother’s neck but then
so did my brother. That’s why we weren’t allowed
to watch Jaws. You shouldn’t watch it either.
Like the cicadas of North America, the songs of the cicadas in Japan are unique to their species. Yet there is something about the timbre and the intensity of one that reminds me of the other. Back in the midwest, I sit in my living room and listen to the cicadas and, for a moment, I feel that I am in Japan.
Read MoreThe car is parked in a ditch before the toll booth,
its lights off and the doors locked.
I don’t have a dollar,
and the booth worker has let me
walk to the convenience store in town
to take money from the ATM.
It’s spring already, and the flowers
in the night are blooming like a dead woman’s hair.
You settle on Hemingway’s salted foreskin. The relic resembles a strip of tree bark. It’s hard to believe it ever hooded Hemingway. The peddler winks at your shrewdness and even quotes a line from The Old Man and the Sea, something about the difference between destruction and defeat.
Read MoreHis smile is crooked, cracked, but blimming Bostonion perfection. He’s having the benedict with crab cakes, at $32. My fork jabs a bite; spits out the blue lump crab meat. It’s an East Coast thing he says, the seafood and breakfast thing.
Read MoreThe summer I turned sixteen, I slept with my rowing coach. It was the first time I had sex in the way it happens sometimes, as a surprise. We were at his younger brother’s funeral, my first boyfriend, then we were along the canal bank, on his suit jacket, me tightening my muscles around him.
Joe had his reasons, or didn’t. He reminded me enough of Mike, straight angles everywhere, cheekbones, rib bones, hips sharp. I needed to stop the loop in my head of Mike loping to the dock, four blades on his shoulder, and the impossible grace he displayed setting them down.
Read More“Well, you in or you out?” Blonde asked me the day it started, meaning: was I going to teeth cigarettes with them or not? Meaning, was I a boy or something worse?
I’d been showing a customer a factory-rusted hubcap, shoveled out in the middle so one could use it as a picture frame. Most of my workdays consist of convincing customers that art doesn’t have to be beautiful, it just has to make a statement.
I started to apologize to the customer before stopping dead, looking toward Blonde, shoving the hubcap at the lady and turning my back in a way to mean I was done helping her. The tails of my apron hit the clenched muscles in my stomach as I swung around.
“You know—”
“I know you’re a girl,” Blonde cut me off, rolled his eyes. “That’s just, like, accepted fact. What I’m saying is are you maximizing profit with us or not? Cooper quit for Hobby Lobby and we need warm bodies.”
Read More