Creative Nonfiction by Sara Quinn Rivara STILL LIFE WITH WOMAN * My sisters and I covered our parents’ minivan in maxi pads as we drove through Ohio, a thin line of cigarette smoke easing from the open windows. Our parents…
Fiction by KSM GROUNDED It wasn’t possible that Gerard had written the note himself. First of all, he’d never spent much time in the Art Books section. And second, it wasn’t his handwriting. But when he pulled the book off…
Visual Poetry by Cindy HillUNTITLED MURAL, ACRYLIC ON FOUR VERTICAL METAL PANELS, 6′ x 8′, c. 1979 …we cover the universe with drawings we have lived.–Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space I. Bedroom Mural I stand on a rockpromontory looking…
Visual Narrative by Clifford Thompson CONNECTICUS DIGGS, Cultural Detective Episode 4: Letters Clifford Thompson’s books include What It Is: Race, Family, and One Thinking Black Man’s Blues and Big Man and the Little Men: A Graphic Novel. His newest book, Jazz June: A Self-Portrait…
Poetry by Robyn Schelenz INTELLIGENCE The developer seized the land during blue winter cold but Jacob’s cows didn’t know. They returned. The shepherd placed metal in his teeth; grass still grew for a thousand other mouths. When I climb the…
Poetry by Jim Stewart IN WHAT CITY DID YOUR PARENTS MEET? The Oyster Bar closed awhile in the pandemic. Before trips to Beacon I went by there with my son, whispered corner to corner in the hallway outside. My Dad…
Flash by Emily RinkemaMAYBE THIS IS WHAT THE END IS LIKE “We could eat the dog,” Sam says. He takes a piece of bread and mops up the sauce left on his plate. It’s his favorite, a roasted red pepper…
Flash by Claudia Monpere GHOST ROOFERS Their bid is high. But I sign. I’ve never worked with a ghost company before. And Ghost Roofers offers a special product; on scalding days their roofs spray cool mist through ceilings and walls.…
Fiction by N.D. Brown SUICIDES Mitchell moved into his mother’s double-wide in time to sign up for Freedom Run High School’s summer football program. The sprints were called “suicides,” and when seen from overhead, the football players’ movement along the…
Flash by Bobby Crace NATIVITY The nativity scene between Denny’s and CVS is still up in February. A strip of grass has forced the characters into a straight line behind a Cabbage Patch Doll strapped to an Igloo cooler. Mary…
Flash by Kevin Spaide LEMON CAKE The cat watches as you eat a piece of the lemon cake you bought this morning even though you know how to make lemon cake and have, in fact, made hundreds of them. At…
Flash Nonfiction by Preeti TalwaiBIRTHDAY PARTY The craziest thing about a C-section is that you don’t feel anything from the chest down, but you can still move and speak just fine. So you make small talk with the nurses who…
Poetry by Simon Parker CARAVAGGIO’S WOMEN In the queue for Caravaggio flesh is made marmoreal a woman in a white dress our baroque beacon who should guide us to a wedding feast where gods are drunk and fallen angels are…
Flash by Louella Lester THE DOCTOR SWEEPS IN On his way past the assistant’s desk he claws my folder from the counter, calls my name, hovers silently for a minute, then lands his oversized feathered feet in front of me,…
Visual Poetry by Elizabeth Johnston Ambrose MASH (A CENTO GAME FOR POETRY LOVERS) M— “The mansion of the sky, whose door is the morning mist, and whose windows are the songs and the silences of night”1 A— “An apartment….the hall…
Flash by Beth Gilstrap THREE MICROS from There Is News Along The Ohio River XII. There is news along the Ohio River: a boy, toddler drunk, walks ahead of his parents whose body language suggests distance, a slow dying of…
Visual Poetry by Katrina Roberts BOX OF AIR Katrina Roberts’s books of poems include Likeness (full-color); Underdog; Friendly Fire; The Quick; How Late Desire Looks; and Lace (chapbook); she’s editor of Because You Asked. Her visual/verbal work appears in publications such as BOMB, Ilanot Review,…
Poetry by Ivy Hoffman EVERYONE HAS CANCER Today at camp, the kids write Andrea Gibson quotes on paper and fold them into airplanes. One of the kids asks me how to spell cancer, waving his arms, a cloud in his…
Flash by Barbara Westwood Diehl FOUR MICROS Scavengers We end our marriage with burnt toast. We end our marriage with cold casserole. We end our marriage with undercooked meat. Untouched. Before, we buttered the toast and ate the blackened bread.…
Fiction by Terri Lewis LEAVING THE STAGE When night fell and lights dimmed, the dream of watching my last play gathered in the shadows and I’d begin to moan. My anguish wasn’t stage fright—that was for the actors—but for the…
Creative Nonfiction by Vivienne Germain FALSE COGNATES OF A REAL ILLNESS actuel ≠ actual En faisant confiance à ce qu’on pense qu’on sait à première vue, on acquiert une sensation de compréhension actuelle. Translation: By trusting what we think we…
Poetry by David John Rosenheim HOTEL RABBINICAL Whisper a benediction to the fly cupped in your palm and release it to the open pane it is grateful for the pale night under its wing A lamb on the slope…
Fiction by Marc Kaufman BRIDGES Rebekah Aronson’s bridge was next. It didn’t look like much, though several of us in class, the 7th graders that also knew her from Hebrew school, had our prints all over it. Fearing we hadn’t…
Fiction by Andrew V. Lorenzen OFF-SCRIPT Long before the fall, before the riots and the unrest, long before it all really began, I experienced a bout of insomnia while backpacking through Southern Asia and began to illegally phone bank voters…
Flash Nonfiction by Aurora Bonner BEDS The cabin is cold after the fire dies mid-night. I watch the rise and fall of my father’s steady breath, just beyond his red whiskers and long black hair. My brother is nestled with…
Flash Nonfiction by Sydney Lea FALLING SHY / NOSTALGIA Falling Shy My boyhood house is not the home of my heart. That wouldn’t surprise you if you knew some things I know, though I won’t examine any of them and…
Visual Narrative by Clifford Thompson CONNECTICUS DIGGS, Cultural Detective Episode 3: Reputations Clifford Thompson’s books include What It Is: Race, Family, and One Thinking Black Man’s Blues and Big Man and the Little Men: A Graphic Novel. His book Jazz June: A Self-Portrait in…
Poetry by Sam Kerbel AFTER-BIRTH There is much grief tied to us Not unlike a hospital cot Where a new father sleeps If he is lucky And finds himself realizing Not for the first time He authored something He knows…
Flash Nonfiction by Sherri Alms WHAT I KNOW ABOUT DEATH A body begins to decompose four minutes after a person leaves it. I was born on my father’s birthday. A week or so before his sixty-third birthday and my forty-second,…
Flash Nonfiction by Jen Bryant SHELTER My first January in Ohio, the river’s surface froze solid. Patches of dirty snow accumulated in parking lots. The sky, the snow, the asphalt: everything was a dull, unrelenting gray. After brewing my morning…
Fiction by Harris Quinn FAIRVIEW I’ve won more than I’ve lost, though I’ve kept no ledger. I’ve lost big, but I’ve won big too. I took 7,000 dollars from a New York man in Aiken after the Masters one year.…
Poetry by Daniel Coudriet HEARTBEATS I am a hospital that missed a war that grew outside. I’ve stolen appliances from empty homes. I’m sorry for all the songs I didn’t complete. It’s hard to have a relationship with a room.…
Fiction by Davis MacMillan OLD FRIENDS A long time ago, when we were little or maybe medium-sized boys, a man did yoga in the park near my house. This was strange: yoga was known but it was not really the…
Nonfiction by Cornelius Fortune ON SUPERMAN Of migratory journeys across a sea of stars Start with an origin story—everyone loves a good origin story. Well, this one is mine, more or less. * It begins with a door, a door…
Fiction by Jake StimmelRED-HEADED MIKE FINNEGAN “I did not take your boat, Mr. Roosevelt, because I wanted to steal something, no indeed; when I took that vessel I was laboring under the impression, ‘Die dog or eat the Hachette.’” —Letter…
Flash Nonfiction by Elizabeth Wenger THE WASP NEST The wasps made their home on our home so that our homes were fused, a hybrid beast, and this wouldn’t do at all, wouldn’t do because there were kids running around (the…
Flash Nonfiction by Judy Harju Galliher WHEN I SEE MY SON IN YOUR TRUCK I remember our road trip to the reunion, how we crammed into the cab of your Tacoma truck, how the metal rod in your spine meant…
Flash by Travis Flatt THE SPARTANS SACK TROY, ALABAMA I. They hunker in the dark, spying from peepholes carved in the galley of the Horse as Police Chief Frank Meyers argues with firemen over how best to haul this giant,…
Poetry by Cal Freeman QUAKER SPEAK FOR DEAD The dreams are different when I sleep beside Lake Erie. I can’t remember them in much detail. Momentous, ethereal, and cruel, they bring my father back at 4am, his predawn writing hour;…
Fiction by Richard Holinger HENRY GOES TO THE SYMPHONY “Your turn for the symphony, Henry,” his mother said at dinner. “It’s Shostakovich and Symphonie Fantastique. Would you like to go?” No, he would not like to go. He stared at…
Flash by Susan Israel GOATVILLE Ambrose Bunch’s backyard was a tangle of weeds that his wife Florence kept harping on him about, so he went out, ostensibly to buy a lawn mower, and came home with a goat. “Flo, meet…
Flash by Sahil Mehta THE COMMUNIST The crimson tattoo, a hammer and sickle, was located about an inch south and half an inch to the right of his belly button. His penis, when enlarged by interest or intrigue, would point…
Poetry by Michael Grinthal I WAS WASHING AT NIGHT OUT IN THE YARD Crying is excellent Practicing Look How the geese Honk and hiss and migrate West. Blasphemous Not false Not even false The sounds I make Are obstinate Kinds…
Poetry by Dara Goodale PERFECT CONDUCTOR when he was eight he stuck a fork into an electric outlet he fried the nerve endings in his right thumb his sense of touch swept away…
Flash Nonfiction by Anne Anthony BEFORE I HELD YOU Before I held you, your father held you cradled in his arms—mine couldn’t, strapped securely to the operating table; before he held you, you flipped, you slippery fish dropping thud-like into…
Fiction by Mary Sauer THE MONARCH Cutting around and behind the main drag in Excelsior Springs, we choose the road often used to bypass the lights and traffic with two sharp, blind curves one after the other. Dad takes each…
Flash by Meg Pokrass TURD-L There was the time my actress sister taught me how to take a bath like a TV star. Ran the bathwater hot so that it felt as if my skin would glow like a pink…
A Craft Essay by Elaine Neil Orr The Present Tense: Conversing with Characters, Then and Now In my new novel, Dancing Woman, the protagonist, an expat American woman named Isabel, unearths an ancient work of art in her garden in…
A Craft Essay by Gerry WilsonSo You Think You Know Your Characters? Think Again. When I first dreamed up the heroine in That Pinson Girl, my literary historical novel released in 2024, Leona Pinson was a naïve little thing, too…
Interview by Andrea CaswellTIM WEED, AUTHOR OF THE AFTERLIFE PROJECT (Podium Publishing) In The Afterlife Project, award-winning author Tim Weed imagines multiple compelling futures: one set in 2068, as a team of scientists races to save humanity from extinction, and one…