3qreview
QUARKS by Hannah Hackney
There’s six: three pairs of flavours (plus their antis, the inverse always lurking in essentials), then divisible by colour charge, named strangely for another rule of three. The force is absolute, bound invisible down at the heart of things. It charms their bodies into structure with a secret swap of gluons at the white quiescent […]
KEPLER’S TELESCOPE FINDS FIVE NEW EXOPLANETS by Andrea Wyatt
Imagine a huge thermometer, we are pretty close to the bottom not as low as Jupiter or Neptune bluest of the blue, but a little higher, between water freezes and water boils closer to freezes, on that imaginary glass device with Fahrenheit on one side going up the thermometer past lead melts is Mercury, brighter […]
TWO POEMS by Steve Shilling
When The Music Stops Call it what you want. Cakewalk, musical chairs, last man standing. I was a master of it. Walk, walk, walk, wait for the needle on the scratchy 45 to stop crackling out the music, walk, walk, walk, THERE! Slide into a seat and bump some poor, slow, schmuck with bad […]
ILLUMINATIONS by Vivian Wagner
I’ve always wanted fireworks to be more than they are. So a sphere, why not a tree, with branches cutting high into the night? So a cascade of stars, why not a writhing serpent? So a burning sapphire ball, why not a volcano, rupturing? The industry has names for its effects: ring palm crossette […]
NO2 by Alex Wilson
Dr. Petrini turns on the nitrous oxide. Nothing changes, he tells me it will take three minutes, that most people think it’s instant, but it’s anything but instant. As the gas takes effect I fight back, counting tiles, listening to Dr. Petrini’s demands to Maria, “Suction.” The opposite of what should happen overcomes me; I […]
EARLY MUSIC by Ryan Warren
It is early in the evening and this pleasant little church, modern, in its way, when it was built, is without ornamentation. Just a large, flat stage for a dais, padded pews descending toward it auditorium-style, wood-paneled walls, reaching windows rising up to the high-beamed ceiling, structured, bright, arcing towards their gentle and progressive god […]
3QR AUTHOR BIOS / 2016
Featured writer: Bear Jack Gebhardt is Senior Librarian at Heart Mountain Monastery—an offline/online community of Buddhist Methodist artists, pilgrims and fellow travelers. He’s been a free-lance writer for many decades and has published nine books, including three stop smoking books and, most recently, a collection of flash fiction, A Wave of Thanks and Other Human Gestures. He has also […]
3QR: FREE TO PASS by Joanne Cavanaugh Simpson
LIBERO IL PASSO: FREE TO STEP OR PASS Consider, for a moment, the concept of the Three Quarter True Story: No censorship for writers. No betrayal for readers. No locked doors with mixed messages. When teaching fiction and nonfiction to university students, I’ve found that the question invariably comes up: What is True? We discuss […]
3QR ANONYMITY TO MYTHOS: Photo Notes by Brian W. Simpson
SNAPPING THE REAL One morning in the spring of 2009, I took a meandering jog in San Francisco. I pounded down the Financial District sidewalks and along the Embarcadero, huffed up Telegraph Hill (okay, I walked up), found my way through North Beach and Chinatown, completing the loop at my hotel. Early in the run, […]
THE BANYAN TREE by Lalita Noronha
Much of what I’ve learned about life comes from plants—the seemingly endless varieties my father planted around our homes in towns along India’s west coast. Each time we moved, my father yanked us from the ground, tap roots and all, and replanted us elsewhere, he in the center, the trunk of a great old banyan […]
3QR: The Three Quarter Review 