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PoetryJune 9, 2013

Cucumbers

PuppetWe sat in near silence – your mother in a creaky rocker, and I, in a hard backed, cushioned chair. Sunlight fell from a window and held a frenzy of dust flakes. It was a Sunday, ten years since that Sunday in May. We smiled at each other, fiddled our fingers, avoided each other’s gaze. Your high school photo, framed in gold, watched us from the mantle: the same picture from the newspaper. Your mother asked about my wife, our lives in the city. How long would I be in town? She spoke of people whose names I could no longer put faces to and confessed that she still searched the wanted ads for jobs she thought you would’ve been good at. “I still can’t bring myself to buy cucumbers. He loved them.” She never mentioned the car accident, or how she had blamed me for your drinking again, and I never told her about that night, after you died, how you visited me and we sat together until morning.

~ Jason Irwin

 

Jason Irwin grew up in Dunkirk, NY and now lives in Pittsburgh, PA.  Watering the Dead, his first full-length collection, won the 2006/2007 Transcontinental Poetry Award and was published in 2008 by Pavement Saw Press. Some Days It’s A Love Story won the 2005 Slipstream Press Chapbook Prize.  Most recently his work has been published or will soon be published in Sliver of Stone, Poetry East, & Future Cycle Press’ anthology American Society: What Poets See. 

Artwork: Puppet, by Hashim Ali

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Hashim AliJason Irwinpoetryweekend poem

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One last love letter...

April 24, 2021

It has taken us some time and patience to come to this decision. TMS would not have seen the success that it did without our readers and the tireless team that ran the magazine for the better part of eight years.

But… all good things must come to an end, especially when we look at the ever-expanding art and literary landscape in Pakistan, the country of the magazine’s birth.

We are amazed and proud of what the next generation of creators are working with, the themes they are featuring, and their inclusivity in the diversity of voices they are publishing. When TMS began, this was the world we envisioned…

Though the magazine has closed and our submissions shuttered, this website will remain open for the foreseeable future as an archive of the great work we published and the astounding collection of diverse voices we were privileged to feature.

If, however, someone is interested in picking up the baton, please email Maryam Piracha, the editor, at maryamp@themissingslate.com.

Farewell, fam! It’s been quite a ride.

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