On a sunny September day in the early 1990s, a German couple taking a shortcut through the rock spires on the Austrian-Italian border spotted the head and back of a man jutting from a patch of half-melted ice. The couple, thinking they’d stumbled across the corpse of a mountaineer, told the owner of the inn they were staying at. He, in turn, contacted the authorities, who sent a forensic investigator.
Author: Porridge Magazine
COMFORT FOODS // Ends and Pieces – Lisa Ochoa
You’ve probably never noticed them. Their red and white box usually sits well below their thick-cut, smoked, and maple-flavored cousins in their clear ‘look at me!’ packaging. Or, sometimes, Ends and Pieces aren’t displayed at all, and you have to ask the butcher for them. Because mind you, they are the ends and pieces, the leftovers, the scraps. Who would want them?
My mom, that’s who.
FICTION | Light of The World – Sue Beardon
How she longs for the asteroid to come, to show them how little they controlled anything.
Book Review: The Woman Dies by Aoko Matsuda, translated by Polly Barton – Arbnora Selmani
Reuniting with translator Polly Barton, Matsuda revisits similar themes in this new collection; across fifty-two stories, she tackles the pervasive misogyny faced by women in contemporary Japan and beyond.
FICTION | The Grammar of Forgetting – Jeffrey-Michael Kane
Desire could drain a reservoir. Fear could empty a playground. And someone like her would be left to label the files.
ONE POEM – Stephanie Russell
The past peels me off like red pared down to
parent rock (think barn, cadaver, three-wheeled
wagon upended in the bee garden).
ONE POEM – Erin Jamieson
My hand slips—crushed pepper
fills the pot, the water is boiling
not simmering as you said, you said
I needed to be careful, but look now
Book Review: House of Day, House of Night by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones – Arbnora Selmani
“We are prompted to savour each word, carefully probing between our teeth to discover new morsels of meaning.”
ONE POEM – Brian Alkire
That albino slug
looks like mobile marzipan,
bending its neck for a nap
in the stitchwort
tufted beside the road.
ONE POEM – Paul Bavister
You slid the nit comb through my hair
then rinsed and laughed about how
you loved hunting them down
ONE POEM – Harriet Sandilands
legs floating, brush of seaweed
bulging water moves us
up and down
the shore seems very far away
ESSAY | Initiation – Kate Stukenborg
I wanted to be a part of their club, their conversations, their laughter. Eating, I decided, was my way in.
Porridge 