DSM’s State of the Union

Don’t worry. We won’t get into policies or delegates or jurisprudence or back taxes or strategic foreclosures or right or left or constituents or education (well, some, hopefully) or economies or deficits or Barack’s ears or mole or his presidential head.

Just monuments like these. That’s it. What we’re about, coño. ‘Nuf said.

Oh, yeah: God bless the US of A.

– They stood stock still and silent at my arrival. My mouth dropped open like a fish, and my eyes grew round as marbles. There they were, all with dark hair and pale faces, huge-eyed and willowy and tall. The clothing was not all blue-gray, I saw. There were enough colors to rival a Parisian fashion show. But not gaudy colors, more quiet, and for some reason, more dignified, than anything I’d seen before. Some of them I had no name for. – Angela Qian in 5923 Quarterly

– Years from now, Rory would remember the first sight of his grandmother—veins lashed to spindly brown legs, stern lips, grey plait as long as a girl’s. A stillness that deleted you. The look in her eyes. She had heard what he could do. – L. Lee Lowe in Blackbird

– We’re in Liam’s apartment. He is cooking dinner for three. One is Liam, two is me, three is the old man who lives on the floor below him. Every day at 5 P.M., the old man, whose name is Dom, takes a TV tray up one floor and sets it up in front of one of the benches outside the elevators and just sits there. – Amy Jones in Taddle Creek

– Peter looked her up and down, the streetlight almost sending sparks off her fire engine red hair. Five-eight, maybe. Boot cut jeans she filled out just right. Some kind of green shirt. Slow, knowing smile. Late thirties, maybe five years younger than him. – Melanie Rigney in Verdad

– She can steal 100 wal­lets and three leather jack­ets from a leather shop in less time than it takes to sew up a loose but­ton or say nine times “a stitch in time saves nine.” She can cart off an espresso machine and a juicer from a kitchen shop faster than it takes a shop owner to look right through her. – Meg Tuite in Divine Dirt Quarterly