After a hugely successful past year at Expanded Field, we have seized the opportunity to break through our previous self-issued limits and expand our output of works. In the future, and starting with this (aptly themed) issue, Limits, we hope to be producing two mini-issues in the fall and spring.

Look at our need

for privacy in defecation

our shyness in courtship

to know our place, and us in it

all too well

I am one of the low countries and, though predictions of cataclysms rise and fall, I'll probably always be one of the low countries.

My people are as statuesque as brioches. Even my monuments refuse to soar.

You don’t know when or why it started. People ask you about it sometimes when you mention that you have suffered from depression. You give them some bullshit answer about it being a delayed reaction to your parents’ divorce.

The queue is long

like a train serpentine,

crawling in silence

at the borders;

the faces, all vacant

Heaven is a prison.

Sergeant Peter is a monolith,

Of cruel bureaucracies and protocols.

Let us see what crimes you have committed –

Reading Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her

For the second time,

After a two-year hiatus

I come across the word “podgy”:

Alice, the kidnapped girl, sits

beside the lake. Her toy boat

is bobbed in various directions

by the currents of fish. Tony,