Portland Review

17/09/2024

we're ready for your work! take a look at https://portlandreview.org/submit/

10/09/2024

We're ready for your book reviews! Visit https://portlandreview.org/submit/book-reviews/ to learn more

27/04/2024

"The last dispatches arriving,

there was air in the parting.
Who has not wished
for different lights—

a stronger, stranger sun?"

Click the link to read more of "Not in Ourselves," a by Ryan Harper ☀️

     I.     Theo Opening again the arrantcorrespondence—relief of the sown fields,bread of affliction:a restless brother burnshis way to harvest,painting space as thing,as woodcut furious,flinders of fire and leaf,heavy, sun-dense strokes, dark notes dealingfor fugitive effects;a red br...

24/04/2024

"The knife was buried in a drawer in my father’s workshop under screwdrivers, a hammer, a T-square, and rasps. He showed me the knife, then put it back, but I wanted it, so later I stole it. In my bedroom I sat, blade in hand, on Nannie’s quilt, and pondered its secret life. Which was my father’s secret life. Which is to say that holding the knife was as near as I got to touching a man I didn’t know. Thrilled by his secret power. Delilah cutting Samson’s hair.

My thrill turned quickly to grief. I knew: hiding is a kind of burial.

I returned the knife to the drawer.

Years later, my father gave the knife to my son who used it to kill garden slugs. Now it sits on a shelf, clean but not too clean. I want the stain, the grit in the cracks.

I want that love."

Are you hooked? "Acadian Armor" by Melanie S. Smith is a poignant exploration of family, place, and time. We are happy to bring you this piece on our site! Find the full piece by following the link below ⤵️

1 Childless and widowed, I slide into bed like a bug that scuttles away to escape getting stomped. I am not a bug but I am flattened. By loneliness, worry, missing my boy, now grown. By the encroaching fog of my father’s dementia. Years ago, his mother made the quilt that covers me. Age and love h...

08/04/2024

Celebrate spring returning with this fresh poem from Edie Meade called "Matanzas." Read now on our site (link below) 🌱

"From a forgetful distance I’m returning
to beauty out of harsh grief, ugly, out of
breath or practice. Returning is the decision
to live. Or. Returning is the discovery
nothing has waited for me."

Nothing has waited for me. The river shrugs its fog shawl. Fisher birds shriek, light whitewing flecks of untouched watercolor paper, watchful of what bubbles in the ink. From a forgetful distance I’m returning to beauty out of harsh grief, ugly, out of breath or practice. Returning is the decisio...

10/03/2024

From "Dear East County," our newest published work of poetry by Deborah Bennett:

"My mother dropped me in the warped
stern of your canoe, paddled me through the rough
locks of the great waters that spilled into rock
salt waters west of East, and I made myself
in your image"

Read now on our site:

You cradled our moto-X babies, our strip mall teens, and three pack a day fathers, chilled our ring-tabbed beer cans in your run-off rivers, and absorbed oilrising like mist from our vats of fried food, sucked exhaust from our tricked-out cars, we atebulbous berries by the hallock, pondered savory,....

03/03/2024

"A parrot in Hindi-Urdu is called tota. It closely resembles another Hindi-Urdu word:toota, which means broken. When I was six or so, my grandmother found an injured parrot half-drowned in her open water tank. She nursed him back to health. He followed her around the house asking, “Are you okay, Kanti? Are you okay, Kanti?”

Technically, he was the only person in that household who ever asked her how she was doing."

This week we are proud to bring you a lovely and inspired piece called "Addendum: Nala-e-bebak" by Scherezade Siobahn 🦜

In Urdu, there exists a phrase—nala-e-bebak: an audacious sorrow.  2007: When my grandmother died, she turned into a parrot. An obscure ritual was performed to determine what type of body she would be reborn in after departing from this one. An earthen pot was filled with river mud and sand, lidd...

02/03/2024

We are now open for nonfiction submissions! For complete submission guidelines, visit our site at https://portlandreview.org/submit. We look forward to reading your work!

27/02/2024

Do you want to in Portland Review? We will be accepting submissions for nonfiction starting Saturday, March 1st 🤩 Don't miss out on this limited call for submissions!

Portland Review publishes narrative nonfiction, personal essays, memoir, flash, and interviews up to 5,000 words. We will only consider one submission per author per reading period. Unless otherwise necessary for the piece, please double-space your work and use a standard (Times New Roman or equivalent) 12-point font.

For over sixty years, Portland Review has published the works of emerging writers and artists alongside the works of well-established authors. We warmly encourage previously unpublished writers and artists to submit, and we aim to support work by those often marginalized in the artistic conversation, including (though certainly not limited to) people of color, women, disabled people, neurodivergent people, LGBTQIA people, and people with intersectional identities.

Work must be original, unpublished, and follow our submission guidelines. All accepted submissions will be published online.

25/02/2024

"Stained and swollen on a slide, part of me
awaits the technician’s microscope.

I am a blight upon the rust of man,
a ruddy cell growing magnanimous."

We're featuring from Mickie Kennedy: "Ruins" and "Stage Three." Check them out on our site!

Ruins A child, two sizes too small. An improvised bomb on loan from the city’s museum of modern art. A plagiarist on the street corner tapping veins for the aftermarket haiku. A chamber maid removed from the chamber. A dream where a naked groomsman asks for sour cream. The bruised grape of a borro...

18/02/2024

"[I]f they are failing,
Money says No good which means that
they are returned to the turning dirt
of their motherland. I remember them
only from the sweet moisture
left on my hand.

Sixteen dollars will pass
and I will be one hour closer
to becoming an ancestor."

This week, we are featuring this new from Jeremy Chu. Check out "Liminality, Organic Ambrosia" on our site (link below) 🍎

https://portlandreview.org/liminality-organic-ambrosia/

11/02/2024

"All of my friends are cutting off their breasts. Top surgery. Breast reduction. The trans and the genderqueer and the top-heavy alike. It’s got me taking stock.

Grapefruits, melons, cannonballs. Bazoongas, sweater puppies, jugs. Fun bags, wocka wockas—god knows, I don’t love them. But they define me. "

This week we are bringing you a reflective short story from Megan Savage called "Grapefruits, Melons, Cannonballs." Check it out by following the link below 🍈

All of my friends are cutting off their breasts. Top surgery. Breast reduction. The trans and the genderqueer and the top-heavy alike. It’s got me taking stock. Grapefruits, melons, cannonballs. Bazoongas, sweater puppies, jugs. Fun bags, wocka wockas—god knows, I don’t love them. But they def...

04/02/2024

"We chinwag about illusion–how one
privileged pipsqueak harboring many big angers brings an empire
to its knees, so now we must bend our backs, kiss the dirt
with our foreheads. Meanwhile, The Short King
bounces on his trampoline, rises to new altitudes. He minimizes
history, downsizes our air fleet to his one big-ass plane, and
the police post notices banning language which measures
the vertical, save ‘colossal’ for The King and ‘smol’
for model subjects."

This week, we are bringing you two poems by Tom Kelly: "The Shortest Short King" and "Tourist."

The Shortest Short King is the same height as an Emperor Penguin, a clown car, a median fourth-grader on roller skates, and though his stature isn’t a punchline necessarily, he behaves like Grade-A di****ad, buys all the beer at the pub, drives his monster truck without a license and crashes into ...