#23: Nonfiction by Kristina Tate
THE ABANDONED (EXCERPTED FROM WAY HOME, A MEMOIR) I’d been asleep for hours, curled around my sister’s yellow blanket when a muffled call pushed its way into my brain. “Siobhan? Siobhan?” My father’s words came to me as though I were underwater. “Where’s your sis—” I rolled over. “Krissy?” My father’s face loomed over me, confused. […]
#22: Fiction by Rebecca Ruth Gould
LIKE A CAVAFY POEM Their coming together was like a Cavafy poem. When they lay in each other’s arms, time compressed into space, and space condensed into time. Every anger, every resentment wrapped them more deeply into the folds of each other’s affections, like an old sweater that is more comfortable to wear than a […]
#21: Poetry by Dmitry Blizniuk
THE GRAY MORNING This gray morning is like the unwashed feet of a dancer, and between the trees, like between the toes, there’s dirt of the night feasts: empty bottles, packs of nuts and chips, cigarette butts. Garbage trucks dump waste containers in themselves, as if a caring nurse empties bedpans from under a palsied […]
#20: Poetry by Judith Bowles
UNTITLED Not finding the grave of my parents I came down the road of misshapened trees whose roots, strangled, shoved up in a mass and a heave. Earth there is parched and speaks, with an effort, of days filled with birds, of the many shades of memorial green. I am getting rid of some clothes […]
#19: Non-Fiction by Renee Nicholson
BEYOND THE CLIQUE: I KNOW WHAT’S HAPPENING 1987: The year I started choosing music for myself, not just passively listening to the radio or my parents’ music. An early choice: R.E.M., who, at this point, distinguished themselves as college radio darlings. When I decided that I, too, liked their sound—mumbly lyrics that, to my teenaged […]
#18: Poetry by D.E. St. John
INCISION The policemen found my friend face up at the river’s edge, in the patterned dark and light of passing clouds. Beyond that, they found ashes from a fire and the outlines of bodies, where men had lain down and slept. Those men were his friends, not mine. They ate and slept and shat […]
#17: Fiction by Pamela McFarland
SHORT I Mary watches Nonna move the antenna on the green plastic television back and forth. “I can’t get this damn thing to work,” Nonna says. The picture on the screen disappears into zigzags. “Watch your language, Ma.” Mommy points to Mary and frowns at Nonna. “Try adjusting the aluminum foil,” Mommy says when it […]
#16: Nonfiction by Rey Armenteros
THE NAMING OF TREES A word is a thing you fill with everything you know about it. Instead, however, a word that sounds familiar but that is actually unclear can shape-shift into something else, granting you the ability to substitute the meaning with almost anything that comes to mind. Instead of stopping to look it […]
#15: Poetry by Cecil Morris
REDEMPTION When she awoke where she should not have been, the black of sin filled the room and sat on her like the weight of her sobbing five-year-old curled on her for comfort, shaking her with grief so profound that words could not hold it, release it, send it across Lethe and set her free. […]
#14: Fiction by Bill Schillaci
UNDERCOVER I met Jesus outside the Café Au Go Go in the middle of Lenny Bruce’s last performance there, the one that would get him arrested for obscenity. I’d noticed Him near the rear wall, nursing a highball. He wore a Panama fedora pulled low, and when my eyes passed over Him, there was a […]