Joe my brother says, spitting smoke toward the ceiling. Another long story.
Joe I say. Joseph.
Guy is a year and a half younger. We’re both Joe. Another long story. He tips back in the recliner. We sit watching football in the parlor of our youth, monk-bald middle aged men sinking into furniture. I am back for the wail and wallow of an Italian funeral. No need to be coy; it’s my mother’s, she whose legacy was to withhold all the Italian except the swears. Let them be American. So at eighteen I left to be a real American, go to college in another city in the dead center of the country. You can’t (or at least you don’t often ) go home again. A very American story. …
Sophia Lambton reached out to me, a book reviewer, to review the first book in her series, The Crooked Little Pieces. Researching Sophia for one of my CLP reviews, I found out that she also writes music critiques, which at the time, my son, a frequent concert-goer, thought he might also like to try his hand at, and I asked for her advice. We struck up a correspondence that has grown into a friendship.
Sophia has also published a consummate biography of Maria Callas, and September 2025 saw the release of The Crooked Little Pieces: Volume 5. (The interview has been edited for brevity).
Do you write with appeal in mind? That is, do you think about what people want to read?…
Sweetness begins like the drizzling of a raincloud Sporadically spitting in tasteful bursts Like ink blotches on wet parchment, Sugar waltzes with taste buds and Bides its time before bursting the dam And flooding the mouth with ambrosia
Confronted with the dim lighting, dark wood, and the tangy, sweet scents of barbequed meat, Kaylee stomped her right foot twice, then, lips pursed, exhaled. Better Ribs BBQ had no signage directing DoorDash drivers where to pick up orders and she dreaded asking.
“Can I help you?” said the young woman at the hostess station.
“I’m…here…for…Door…Dash.”
The hostess tilted her head. “You drive a car?”
If Kaylee could speak normally, she would––every day, every time, every word—but she couldn’t. Kaylee swallowed. “Yes…I’m…a…Door…Dash…driver.”
Two other orders sat in the car with her husband, David, waiting to be delivered. Saturday evenings they made good money, got plenty of work in a concentrated area, picked up several purchases in a row, and then dropped them off one, two, three at addresses near each other.…
Tick. Tick. Tick. Kenny watched as the clock on the wall of his seventh grade classroom moved closer and closer to twelve, it seemed to taunt him with its slow, unending ticks. His foot had begun to shake uncontrollably in anticipation, smacking against the tile flooring like the applause of a crowd. In about five minutes, when both hands of the clock met at the very top, the teacher would call out Kenny’s name and he would have to go give a speech at the front of the room. The speech was on the history of Chicago, he had always loved the city, but he found himself dreading it now as the countdown drew closer to zero. He hadn’t really prepared for the speech, it’s not that he didn’t have time, his teacher gave him almost a month, its just that it got lost in the daily tangle of life until suddenly it was speech day and he had nothing.…
When he first showed me the crescent-shaped rash on his chest, right over his heart, I glanced at it from across the kitchen. My husband was fresh from the mid-summer garden, dripping fresh salty sweat on the floor. I knew better than to come too close, and there was always something. The cactus splinters in his hands, the twig in his eye, his darkened rotting toe. “Feel it!” He didn’t sound too desperate, so I said, “I’m not a doctor.”
That afternoon, I scooped cookie dough. My husband walked in from the garage and pulled off his damp tank top. Even though I’m near-sighted I could see the eruption, now a quarter moon, which covered his chest and protruded at least an inch. I bent down to examine its details, touched it tentatively.…
Good Girl and Other Yearnings by Isabelle Correa (Photo: Write Bloody Publishing)
Isabella Correa’s collection of poetry, Good Girl and Other Yearnings, carefully draws upon popular music and rhyme to interrogate the meaning of what it is to be a woman and a worker in the digital age. At the same time, sonorous lines and uncanny imagery explore tragedies of family relations.
For example, in my favorite poem of the collection, “interview with a dead girl,” the spiritual intersects with the mundane, as the speaker’s hair turns into a halo in the first stanza (“hair spooling into haloes”). Before work, eggs boil at breakfast in the next stanza, which have been overcooked as they “pop,” and a “sting of oil, that sustenance of speckled heat,” anoints the speaker’s arm.…
