#73: Fiction by Michèle Gagnon
SINKING At the very beginning, a few incoherences, everyday objects disappearing and suddenly reappearing in unusual places: keys in the fridge, a bag of lemons on the laundry room shelf, hat and scarf in the oven. Then, words failing us to the point that we withdraw ourselves from any conversation, faces fading, friends and relatives […]
#72: Poetry by Laurinda Lind
CHEATING AT WAR I invented generals and pulled them out to the field unfairly which means palming kings, putting them at top of the deck plus slaying everything in sight with aces, some stolen, some prematurely played. I was a kid and my cousin was trying to kill me with cards […]
#71: Poetry by Gabrielle Peterson
WHAT COLOR YOU ARE WEARING I WILL remember like i am prey hiding in the grasses. a baby boy got eaten last week and they think it’s cause his mother was color blind. to detect the slightest bend in hue is rewarded in nature with status quo. how much we give to stay the same. […]
#70: Fiction by Hilary Stanton
CHARACTER LIMITS Age 12 Angela inserts a floppy disk into the drive. “You know that story you wrote last week? I turned it into a text adventure.” She types the run command, then hops out of the folding chair she uses at her computer desk and offers it to Ben. “Try it.” Five inputs […]
#69: Poetry by Gale Acuff
SLAIN Death is something we live with all the time my Sunday School teacher says after class and she could’ve said it before class, too, I guess that’s her point or part of it and for that matter she could’ve interrupt -ed class to make it, but she didn’t, but maybe by not doing that […]
#68: Poetry by Roy Bentley
THE DAILY SEDUCTION OF BEING THIS PERSON INCLUDES KNOWING MY MOTHER LOVED ME Ray Charles singing “You Don’t Know Me” aside, you can know someone. Call it experience him or her or they. And that being true, I feel the daily seduction of being this person and how it includes the information my […]
#67: Fiction by Becky Tuch
RECONCILIATION To: TanishaKay@HappyArt.Org May 20, 2020 Hi Tanisha, I hope this email finds you well. I understand you may not want to hear from me. But I thought I would reach out in the hopes of clarifying some things we did not get a chance to discuss. Perhaps in hearing my side of […]
#66: Nonfiction by Lindsey Schaffer
REFLECTIONS The day I was born my mother gave birth to the same child twice. At least, that is how I live the first few years of life, indistinguishable from my sister. We have the same toys, the same friends, the same faces. I can’t pinpoint exactly when I seek to distinguish myself, but I […]
#65: Poetry by Joddy Murray
LONGEVITY, BRIEFLY No grass is as rooted as Bermuda with its beard of roots mingling like sentences in the filth of clarity. No song has as deep regrets as anthems trumpeted off of rock-face scabs, plucky decay that this day sounds as dim as sugar. You greet whatever rain comes with a smirk, the kind […]
#64: Fiction by Siamak Vossoughi
THE FARSI TEACHER That fall every one of his students was an American who was married to an Iranian. Lord, but they butchered the language in that class. They came into the classroom like Americans, big and excited, and he knew from their general manner that their mouths were not going to conform to the […]