Empty Mirror

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On Empty Mirror’s First Twenty Years

Denise Enck

Empty Mirror - 20 years

On December 30, 1999 I left my last day as a retail store manager, and I never looked back. I'd worked in and managed bookstores and wanted to open my own. I'd been collecting out-of-print, signed, … [Read more...]

Spot the Differences

Taylor Byas

photo by Yuxiang Zhang

When my mother met my father in 1992 in Chicago, she was 17 and my father was 20. My mother was a senior in high school, and my father out of school and working, already a supervisor at the Luster … [Read more...]

Three poems by Bailey Grey

Bailey Grey

Long Beach WA watercolor / credit: de

reflections by naming an ocean / we shrink it / it gains sharp edges and an orientation / (who decided that north means up?) we are like reflections in spoons / (cotton balls and lighters) … [Read more...]

Music In A Blade of Glass: Jim Whiteside’s Writing Your Name on the Glass, reviewed by Alina Stefanescu

Alina Stefanescu

Jim Whiteside - Writing Your Name On the Glass - Bull City Press

Writing Your Name On the Glass by Jim Whiteside / Bull City Press / 35 pages / 978-1-949344-08-0 / 2019 fugue (n.) in music, a contrapuntal composition in which a short melody or phrase … [Read more...]

Mining the Ruins: Andrea Burgay

Andrea Burgay

Eastern Seaboard (detail) - Andrea Burgay

My work elevates the overlooked and the mundane through a process of cutting, reconfiguring and unifying a variety of handmade, found and discarded materials. Using paper ephemera whose original … [Read more...]

Behind the Scene: visual poetry by hiromi suzuki

hiromi suzuki

Behind the Scene 6 by hiromi suzuki

We can see the lights in the distance. Through the thin papers coated with Linseed oil. The Lumière brothers said, "The cinema is an invention without any future". The cine projector continues to … [Read more...]

Four poems by Allan Graubard: For Steve Dalachinsky, Ira Cohen, and Ronnie Burk

Allan Graubard

recall / credit: em

I am reading Lundkvist's dreams       when he was in               a … [Read more...]

Four Paintings and a Poem by Stephen Lee Naish

Stephen Lee Naish

mixed media art (detail) by Stephen Lee Naish

Untitled a Coke machine a smile a casual "hi" a walk barefoot in cut grass a door a gas station a pencil a paperclip a desire to be anything you want a bed a … [Read more...]

Three poems by Constance Bacchus

Constance Bacchus

Riverside Columbia / credit: de

helen imagines she is cailleach on a snowed in Thursday wears a wig of stiff twigs glasses, holding the sun hat, a lot of makeup or none she has a feather brown flying coat rainbowed scarf, … [Read more...]

Chasing the Moon

Sarah Zanabli

The moon over Aaqrabâte, Syria / photo by Samer Daboul

Our story begins in a scalding desert city, the aroma of burning nearby: burning salty corn the size of a pistol and burning garbage on the side of semi-paved country roads. Strangers minding their … [Read more...]

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Empty Mirror

Established in 2000 and edited by Denise Enck, Empty Mirror is an online literary magazine that publishes new work each Friday.

Each week EM features several poems each by one or two poets; reviews; critical essays; visual art; and personal essays.

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Recent features

  • My Father’s Map
  • On Waiting
  • Seeing Las Meninas in Madrid, 1994
  • Visual poems from 23 Bodhisattvas by Chris Stephenson
  • Historical Punctum: Reading Natasha Trethewey’s Bellocq’s Ophelia and Native Guard Through the Lens of Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida
  • Panic In The Rear-View Mirror: Exploring The Work of Richard Siken and Ann Gale
  • “Art has side effects,” I said.

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