Corey Mesler has been published in numerous anthologies and journals including Poetry, Gargoyle, Five Points, Good Poems American Places, and New Stories from the South. He has published over 20 books of fiction and poetry. With his wife he runs Burke’s Book Store (est. 1875) in Memphis.
Artwork by Edward Michael Supranowicz
Headache
A headache the size and shape
of Milwaukee
and it’s sunny and cold
in Memphis
where I sit like a deposed author
who used to know
so much about the heart and its
messages, incoming and outgoing.
Given enough rope
Given enough rope
we could all hang
ten; we could all
find a way to the
monkey’s den. And
once there we could
all fall in love. It would
be that kind of apocalypse.
From the Editor:
We hope that readers receive In Parentheses as a medium through which the evolution of human thought can be appreciated, nurtured and precipitated. It will present a dynamo of artistic expression, journalism, informal analysis of our daily world, entertainment of ideas considered lofty and criticism of today’s popular culture. The featured content does not follow any specific ideology except for that of intellectual expansion of the masses.
Founded in late 2011, In Parentheses prides itself upon analysis of the current condition of intelligence in the minds of these young people, and building a hypothesis for one looming question: what comes after Post-Modernism?
The idea for this magazine stems from a simple conversation regarding the aforementioned question, which drew out the need to identify our generation’s place in literary history.
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By In Parentheses in Volume 10
48 pages, published 10/15/2025
in parentheses 
enter the discussion: