Top-Shelf features poems, stories, artwork, and photography that refuse to let go. Work you carry off the page and into your mind, your heart, your chest. Work that stays with you all day and draws you back to the page again and again. Fresh work arrives here year-round, between issues.
- The Jazz You Cannot Listen with Your Body Whole by Philip Chijioke Abonyi
In the afternoon of April 2026, the sun suffers cataractin Benue state. the world is not seeing, her eyeball fullof gunshots and people. Packing their… Read more: The Jazz You Cannot Listen with Your Body Whole by Philip Chijioke Abonyi - MERRIAM-WEBSTER by Louis Faber
As a young child I learned my grandmother never had a dictionary - On the Streetcar by Jeffrey Zable
I sat down next to a disheveled looking homeless guy—two empty seats to his right and one to my left—and it couldn’t have been more… Read more: On the Streetcar by Jeffrey Zable - Allary by Robert Dosdourian
No one remembers Allary—a smoky, dusky jazz nightclub on South Main Street in Providence, Rhode Island back in the late 1970s. I only heard about… Read more: Allary by Robert Dosdourian