issue nO. 6

Welcome to Union Station Magazine’s 6th issue. As I’m writing this LL Cool J’s ‘Hey Lover’ is on the pod, the rain is coming down hard outside. Brooklyn is drenched and the wet covers everything indoors too with a strange and sensuous sweat and changes the essential nature of what we think we know...

poems: Sam Sax

three dollars for a cup of coffee.   in the coffee shop a soul singer’s trapped in the speaker.  she hates  how her voice distorts like faux leather in louisiana   ...

fiction: Jai Chakrabarti

THE BOYS AT PRIMARY SCHOOL     We real cool. We Left school. We Lurk late. We Strike straight. We Sing sin. We Thin gin. We Jazz June. We Die soon.1 When we were children, our missionary would speak these words. His voice was like a parakeet’s, musical even when it didn’t mean to be. That...

the conversation: Aracelis Girmay with Jon Sands

When praising Aracelis Girmay’s first collection of poems, “Teeth”, Martín Espada cited Sandra Cisneros’s praise for writer, Denise Chávez, in saying “I love this book so much it sounds like I’m lying.” Angel Nafis introduced her for a reading at Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn by calling...

poem: Coriel Gaffney

HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY   Somebody’s shaking the bony shoulders of a girl with terribly red hair who’s not sorry. Somebody’s drooling with such sincerity, Somebody’s sure the spit is a clue. Somebody’s had her ovaries removed. Each morning, Somebody pours the nothing they...

nonfiction: Rich Villar

HOW I GOT OVER A Year in the Life of My Writing Process, Which Was Obviously Much More Than a Year     I believe that listening to How I Got Over by the Roots comes the closest anyone can come to experiencing, through the senses, Wallace Stevens’ theory of supreme fiction. Because, if you...

fiction: Claire Shefchik

MERMAID AVENUE A stage floating in New York Bay hosts a clutch of jovial Negroes wearing royal blue garters on the elbows of their crisp pinstripe shirts, their fat tubas and xylophones thrust out like rooster tails. The bandleader spots Gage, with Josie on his arm, and gestures to his compatriots, who throw...

photo essay: Eva Fazzari

SNOW GLOBE Drawn to the stillness of the suburbs, I document anticipation and aftermath but never the main event—moments after a birthday party, minutes before a storm, the echo of an argument. Growing up in a small town, there were two theories on life: 1) Leave. Then, you can live. 2) If you have...

poem: Anis Mojgani

MY LIBRARY HAS 17 BOOKS   1 I wore a shrine to you above my head for so many years it hung like a heavy hat and sparkled like a Hindu god 2 my face is a bicycle riding downhill lick me with your headlight I will forget my helmet at home break my femurs upon your front fender 3 I am filled with so much...

fiction: Leah Griesmann

DESERT RATS     I had been trying to dump Jerry for three weeks. The apartment manager, Ruby, promoted what little developed of our dalliance when I’d just moved in. At her encouragement he stopped by, introducing himself as a “nice Jewish boy,” though he was in fact forty-three. We started...

poems: Ed Menchavez

MOVING TO HOLLYWOOD   The crust of things boiled over collects at steel’s edge as I plow against the stove, my ivory shrine decorated with years of disregard. I scrape with the knife my little brother gave me, a knife not his, the blade carbon steel, the length of a hand, straight until it angles at...

poems: Marty McConnell

song of the mysterious and elusive female ejaculation   to refer to the female orgasm as a landmine detonating is to ignore the ways the world is remade through light. a kind of frailty is required of us for anything beyond breathing in the same room. I am vulnerable when my hand is inside you....

nonfiction: Saeed Jones

NOCTURNE     In college, my friend Maggie and I would attempt to wear out our insomnia by walking from our dorms through all of Bowling Green’s past lives to get to a bridge rusted with memory of use. Past the downtown square, past the “historically black” part of Bowling Green, past the...

book review: Three Graces

THREE NEW FEMALE VOICES I ADMIRE, AND WHY IT MATTERS   Every poetry teacher I’ve ever encountered has stressed the importance of reading much and reading widely; of exploring voices similar to your own alongside poets you may struggle with; of delving into the poetry of past decades and centuries as...

poem: C. Derick Varn

LIMITATIONS: TONE TO TONE Much has been said on thunderous silence: the gradual unmooring of the voice you hear, long half-drowned in the inky past, and if the scream you have choked back, kicked open your lips and drank the greenish air. There is more to say on nothing than can be said: someone is feeding...

poem: Jenn Blair

THE BODY, AFTER RESURRECTION   * It shall be, according to some medieval theologians, always thirty-three, the age of our Lord when He set his face like flint towards Jerusalem’s hills.   * It shall glisten at the heel and every pore, defying the worm and contagion. Skin soft as Lambs Ear,...

poem: Adrian Matejka

1/12 NOTES FOR A WINTER NIGHT   1. The moon drops, the moon drops. The moon drops into a 3-point stance the night before the big day. The moon’s ample gut recognizes the pull of chocolate. The moon’s hustle excommunicates even a dollop of soul music after 8am. Baby, even planetary concubines like...

fiction: M.D. Joyce

THE SLEEPER AND THE NIÑA     The car chugs along the expressway. The summer heat has been oppressive, but right now it feels good going 70 miles per hour through the late July early morning. You feel like you’re that knife cutting through the “tension so thick” that sportscasters...

poem: Holly Day

    IN HIDING   I dumped his body behind the horse barn, piled horse shit all over the corpse until he was gone. Later, I took his favorite horse out for a ride took it to the part of the field where purple thistles grew thick and wild. “Eat up,” I told the horse, gave it its head let it...

poem: Adam Bowser

VITILIGO WITHIN   “I’m gonna make a change for once in my life It’s gonna feel real good, gonna make a difference Gonna make it right” I don’t know at what point you begin to hate yourself, Studying the mirror: finger tracing the outline of the face, the one you no longer refer to as...

poems: Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz

THE MAN WHO LOCKED WOMEN IN HIS BASEMENT   and fed them dog food and kept them naked in chains and threw them in pits and raped them and, of course, killed them—the torso he roasted in an oven, the body he discarded in the pine barrens—he would make the women turn on each other and tell on each...