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…
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…
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…
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;…
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,…
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…
Interview by Andrea Caswell TERRI LEWIS, AUTHOR OF BEHOLD THE BIRD IN FLIGHT: A NOVEL OF AN ABDUCTED QUEEN (She Writes Press) In Behold the Bird in Flight, Terri Lewis brings to life the unusual story of Isabelle d’Angoulême, a young…
Interview by Catherine Parnell AMIE SOUZA REILLY, AUTHOR OF HUMAN/ANIMAL (WLU Press) A bestiary in essays, Amie Souza Reilly’s Human/Animal chronicles the nightmare that ensues when Reilly and her family purchase their dream home and move in only to be harassed…
Poetry by Barbara Daniels RED WING If death is marriage, I’ll marry the oil stain under my car. I’ll marry a bright wing. Weeds bend their frayed heads down to dirt, the sky equivocal, the old pines. The door behind…
Fiction by Callie Ann Marsalisi FOUR, FIVE, SIX All of the eggs are broken. One, two, three. Four, five, six. Both rows of the carton she mistakenly left open on the counter. Smashed. She closes the carton and thinks. She’s…
Visual Narrative by Clifford Thompson CONNECTICUS, DIGGS, Cultural Detective, Episode 2: The Break 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…
Fiction by Shaun Pieter Clamp A ROCKET’S TALE The scaffolding falls. I’m a shiny rocket nose downslope into crater. Imperfect bliss kindles in the mouth of the stone. I make my way down there on wheels. The bright moment will…
Fiction by Jeffrey FeingoldFIVE EASY PIECES Bobbie Bernstein rolled on her side to give Rayne a goodnight peck. She’d lost the baby a few days earlier, was still sore, and the rolling was a chore. White eyelet curtains fluttered as…
Flash Nonfiction by Diane Zinna FALL DICTIONARY Rainbow Coffee Mug: Noun. A broken cup found in the still-running sink. My mother must have been washing it. It lay in four white pieces in the silver-gray basin, and she lay on…
Fiction by Thomas William Brewer THE BALLPARK The ballpark rumbles under the steps of the spectators, zealots eagerly streaming into a cathedral of dirt and grass. A boy squeezes his father’s hand as they weave through the congregants and walk…
Nonfiction by Michelle Bitting STILL LIFE WITH FAMILY AND THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE (with screen quotes from his bifurcated self) My analysis of this soul, the human psyche, leads me to believe that man is…
Flash by Christine H. Chen WINDOWS TO THE SOUL While your parents went out to pitch Ma’s dress design ideas to strangers, you were locked inside the apartment, the tick-tock of the wall clock your only companion. In the box next to…
Fiction by Alysha Black THE RUNNING WOMAN Nia saw the way everyone looked at her as she wheeled her kids around the grocery store at ten pm, and she hated it. Five months had passed since Peter’s death, and still,…
Poetry by Nora Gupta ELEGY WITH SALTWATER PEARLS I track my body through snow brimming with sweat, tears, the eternal glow of tobacco and ash, an unfinished stub melting its way into the ground. Inside, succumbed to hospice, you wrap…
Flash Nonfiction by Crockett DoobTHREE MICROS EVERYTHING WITH NOTHING There’s a bagel place I like a block away from work. I go in there and order “an everything with nothing,” which the cashier thinks is funny, and I guess I…
Flash Nonfiction by Charlotte GullickWEDDING DRESS Right now, the daughter and father are alone, the girlfriend—his—sits outside. She pulls on a joint, distancing herself from this, his dying. The girlfriend tries to make room for his children, for the connection…
Nonfiction by Lane Osborne BODY MEMORY When my family and I visited my uncle at his home weeks after he’d lost his leg, knee-down to diabetes, I tried not to stare. Not at what remained of his left leg, or…
Fiction by Liana Johnson EXPOSURE “Haven’t you ever been spurned by a lover?” Ms. Smith said in her outside voice. Our sixth-grade English class was acting out The Crucible in the school library. Ms. Smith directed the question to Jake,…
Fiction by Elise Wallen-Friedman NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH The Zoo Mrs. Rothenbloom stares at the sheet music propped up on her piano. She taps her foot, her light-brown sock padding into the shag rug carpet. AC pumps through the house, so the…
Nonfiction by Michael CoppermanYAKU Grandma Betty never arrived from Hawaii empty-handed. Bringing herself was enough: though she was four-foot-ten at best, she carried herself gracefully, with an air of self-assurance and ease. She wore designer clothes from Japan with flowy…
Nonfiction by Jay Hodges AS YOU WIND DOWN Planets whirl, asteroids careen, the sun and the moon come and go. Tectonic plates shift, volcanoes spew, icebergs calve, droughts creep, humidity swaddles. Hail pings automobiles, and lightning blitzes planes. Ghost ships…
Poetry by Naisha Randhar YOU & I My best friend and I grieve the world on the way to school. We walk through chalk pictures, afraid of having kids. Dragonflies in a lit golden cage. Like islands, we are silhouettes.…
Flash by Frances Blankenship THE REFRIGERATOR That morning when Lydia woke up, she saw that she’d become a refrigerator. It must have happened fairly quickly since she was certain she had woken around two a.m. to give the baby a…
Flash by Gregory Meece THE SKETCHBOOK Blacktop parted infinite walls of cornstalks as I drove through another town. It was as if Moses had stretched his hand across a verdant sea. A fallen leaf on a current, I was pulled…
Poetry by Russell ZintelANIMALS THAT HAVE NEVER SET FOOT IN A SMILING KITCHEN Felt like a stray In deer form. Felt like a Eurasian red squirrel, As a pet without ownership. Ate like a lion, which is to say gloriously…
Nonfiction by Meg LeDuc THE TESTAMENT OF MY BODY Chapter 1 I’m reading Julian of Norwich, the fourteenth-century Christian mystic, on this October morning. 2 Julian writes, “Whenever a human mother nurtures her child with all that is beautiful and…
Nonfiction by Dava Sobel, reviewed by Beth JohnstonThe Elements of Marie Curie: How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Women in Science (Atlantic Monthly Press) In The Elements of Marie Curie, Pulitzer-prize winner Dava Sobel promises not only…
Interview by Brian Burmeister ACTOR/WRITER/DIRECTOR GREG SESTERO, STAR OF THE ROOM AND AUTHOR OF THE DISASTER ARTIST Greg Sestero has worn many hats in his creative career. As an actor, he’s been in numerous films and TV shows, most famously…