“We walk in the shadows in giants,” I tell my friend Laila, before realizing that this isn’t the phrase. It’s ‘stand on the shoulders of giants,’ isn’t it? I don’t think they noticed. Either way, the accidental adaptation is a fitting one for what we’ve just witnessed—a multi-media spoken word event in which the two
Tagfiction
Leonardo
There were new points of pain now, the body speaking verses so decisive and dense, Claudia could no longer understand the sensation. It was not a knot in the belly or a blinding headache—no, it was aches occupying the edges of words and images, unrefined and unpronounceable. Some afternoons when the winds were not so
Even the Clean Ones are Unclean
It’s that time of summer: when everyone’s everywhere doing everything when days are longer, happinesses stronger when the green grass looks like it’s been told I-love-you. Six past six o’clock. Evening. The sun is effulgent, the wind mildly turbulent. At a field, around a neighborhood, in Berlin, on a sunny summer Sunday, three friends meet
Birth of the Blue Heron
Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire. My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly, Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I? A fallen man, I climb out of my fear. The mind enters itself, and God the mind, And one is One, free in the tearing wind. “In a Dark Time” By
The Fire That Never Went Out
Die Bärliner invites you to revisit a flash fiction piece by BCB graduate Océanne Fry (HAST’ 21), originally published during our Poetry Month in April. Océanne worked on this project last Spring semester as part of the “LT 167 Writing African Futures” course taught by Prof. Dr. Kerry Bystrom at BCB, in association with the
Open your eyes
A slow movement of the eyes before the dizziness of the day is taking over. The clumsy beams of the Sun are rushing into the mirror on the wall and then bouncing back, leaving behind no more than a puddle of light. The birds are finding their melodies they lost during the night, starting the
I Checked and It Was Still There
“But as they burned, disappearing irrevocably one after the other, you stopped believing that there was any purpose in a book’s existence. Or perhaps the only one to have worked out their purpose was the Sarajevan author and bibliophile who, instead of using expensive firewood, warmed his fingers last winter on the flames of Dostoevsky,
Choice Words
We are at Boots, Etc., exit 149 when driving South in Georgia towards New Orleans. We watch as a man hammers hand-wrought silver tips onto Henry’s new red leather boots. The man uses shining little nails, he squints, he moves his hands as delicately as a pianist, as a mother braiding hair. As he works behind