Hear Jeff Friedman Read His Prose Piece Aloud

If you've flipped through our latest issue, you've located our newest poetry selection. As an added bonus for our readers, we asked poet Jeff  Friedman to read his prose piece aloud for you to experience the piece as he does."Legerdemain"“Enough tricks,” she said as her opal earrings disappeared from her ears and a parrot flew from her purse, as pink smoke rose between us. “Enough sleight of hand, enough legerdemain—” as I pulled an egg from her nostril, a hundred dollar bill from her ear, and the bra from under her shirt, as I waved my hands and said the magic words and watched her float in air, supine. Against my will, she righted herself and walked through a door as if only spirit. Before I knew it, she kissed me. “No more tricks,” she said as her black thunderous hair fell loose down her back, as her jeans split at the seams and fell off, revealing her turquoise thong. “Okay,” she said, “if that’s who we are.” Then I was naked, and as the smoke cleared, there was nothing between us.Jeff Friedman has published six poetry collections, five with Carnegie Mellon University Press, including "Pretenders" (2014), "Working in Flour" (2011) and "Black Threads" (2008). His poems, mini stories and translations have appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry, New England Review, The Antioch Review, Poetry International, Flashfiction.net, Hotel Amerika, Flash Fiction Funny, Agni Online, The New Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish Poets, Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Smokelong Quarterly, The Vestal Review, and The New Republic and numerous other literary magazines. Dzvinia Orlowsky’s and his translation of "Memorials by Polish Poet Mieczslaw Jastrun" was published by Lavender Ink/Dialogos in August 2014. Friedman and Orlowsky were awarded an NEA Literature Translation Fellowship for 2016.