Widow

By Julianne Paholski

An old boyfriend came courting. I was standing in Grandma’s breezeway, looking out over the yard, and he came walking down the side street from the cemetery. Everything was still and overcast, humid, as if there might be a storm.

He looked as I remembered, the one time I’ve seen him since high school: middle-aged heaviness, hair long and curly. He was wearing weird round little glasses, as if trying to resemble James Joyce.

Does God Cry?

By Jack Smith

“What do you and Younger Son have planned?”

“Nothing, I swear.”

Father’s raised fist was poised to eliminate Mother’s look of contempt. He paused and for a moment Mother hoped that he would see himself clearly, as he had a few times before; lower his fist, go into the house, take a six pack out of the propane powered fridge, take down his fly rod and go to the river leaving Mother wondering what would happen in the future to recreate this tableau and wishing Older Son would return from a gathering of The Brotherhood.

By Candlelight

By Paul Ilechko

Grouped by candle flame into specific
tableaux as lightning breaks the sky

a glass of vin blanc and the memory of
Athens a church atop a hill an old

Visual Art

By Alison Engle

What We’re Reading, Winter 2022

By The Editors

Here’s what some of SHARK REEF’s editors have been enjoying in recent weeks. Managing Editor Stephanie Barbé Hammer I am reading and loving two incredible poetry collections and a gorgeous novel. The Store-House of Wonder and Astonishment by Sherry Mossafer Rind (Pleasure Boat Studio, 2021) uses the persona poem to explore natural history from a […]

Look Around

By Stephanie Barbé Hammer

Our Winter 2022 issue invites you to look at the not so see-able and perhaps even to learn to seek out what cannot — normally — be perceived. Appropriately, this issue contains invisible babies, lunar seashells, unnoticed birds, unspoken tensions between families, paternal scars, and wondrous insects. What marvels lurk in laundromats and along the byways of the everyday? How do we — in this age of very real limits — quest for and discover the magical and the miraculous?