Gulf Coast Online Exclusives


The Pirate Story

Tom Macher

I learned to sleep as light as a new mother, in increments of minutes rather than hours, listening as I dreamed for a rustling of clothing, a knife unsheathed, and then I stopped sleeping altogether.


Bright Perfection

Nancy Au

The chicken crows at midnight. Crows at four o’clock in the morning. Crows when it rains. Crows when the sun sets. Crows when sirens blare down our street. Only stops crowing to eat.

Playing in the Institute: on Tag at ICA Philadelphia

C. Klockner

It’s still a question of how queer exhibitions can function within certain institutions without assimilating, without petrifying living works in order to propose additions to “the” hegemonic canon, but Tag proposes ways forward that walk indeterminacy with confidence.

Mott Street in July

Xuan Juliana Wang

It did not yet boggle their minds that the insides of those things that fly also look like the insides of those that swim. They had yet to question why the bones of a fish could look like the bones of a kite. They had not known to wonder how far to look back in history for the connection.

By the Light of Other Suns

Janie Paul

We talked about light and dark, how to render it in paintings and drawings, and how it connects to spirit. We talked about Emerson and Thoreau. They connected their faiths to mine, to the pantheism I developed out there in the woods, and to art as faith. As I worked with artists in prison over the next couple of decades, I continued to see this transcendental connection to light and dark through their eyes.


From the Archives

Interview with 2012 Barthelme Prize Winner Josie Sigler

Josie Sigler

"And what does being safe mean? (Besides having to practically get naked to be allowed to get on a plane? Besides dropping bombs?)"...

Ghost Fire

Doug Ramspeck

The old men are unsure. Something is twisting up and up to become a stair. And what is the end for? Who would stop here and dream such accumulations? Once…

Strawberry Girl: A Prose Sestina

María Isabel Alvarez

Your husband watches like a phantom through the window, his face silvered in smoke. His eyes, once brimming with affection, have slanted into whispers. You want his puckered face to catch a clod of dirt.

Cut of the Blade

James Grabill

They continue to throw salmon shadows darkening the spectrum as it prisms into conditions, leaving a ruin of bleached coral in regret...


From the Blog

Losing the Plot: On Lauren Berlant's Desire/Love

In their entry on love, Berlant writes that we tend to (mistakenly) use the objects our desire attaches to in order to assume an identity— “you know who…

Feeling Political

For Berlant, part of the problem of politics is that marginalized people have to accommodate the feelings of their majority counterparts in order to successfully…