Louella LesterWHAT MIGHT HAPPEN WHEN YOU’RE STUCK On the fifth day of the heat wave, even though the asthmatic air conditioner is faltering, Char stops going outside. Not to get fresh air. Or to exercise. Or to soak up the…
Charlotte MorettiRUNNING ALONE AT NIGHT She chewed on a jagged piece of skin that she had pulled along her thumbnail as she drove, her right wrist dangling limply on the steering wheel. She drove quickly as she snuck glances at…
Michelle RossTHE CONTENTS OF MY EXES’ REFRIGERATORS Andrew It was a mini fridge, so not much. Also, it was college, so mostly beer most of the time until we drank those Heineken, one by one winnowing down to whatever else…
Robin NeidorfLEAVE NO TRACE the full moon rises in the cleft ……………………………between rock and green-turning- gold on gravel trails twenty miles ……………………..northwest of this circle of stones today’s bootprints start to erode under those traces lie yesterday’s …………………………… …………………………… …………lower…
Jennifer HaydenDESPINA: a visual narrative Jennifer Hayden is a graphic novelist based in New Jersey. She is the author and artist of The Story of My Tits, a graphic memoir about her life and her experience with breast cancer, which…
Candace HartsuykerWHEN YOU’RE THE CONTORTIONIST It happens like this: your sister is skipping with a jump rope, her feet slap slapping the sidewalk. You go into the house to get a glass of water, and when you come back, your…
Philip SchaeferDON’T KICK THE DOG Just last week doves glued to the beach, stuck between physics and chemistry. Beneath the Puget Sound. No guns, no sharks. A simple conundrum. There is a history within history, angles prior to geometry. Names…
Lisa LebduskaABLATION Faced with a choice between freezing or burning, my mother chose burning. Her decision surprised me because she hated Florida, where she had never lived, and she hated summers in New York, where she spent July and August…
Eric RasmussenMEANINGFUL DEPARTURES I. McKenzie sees it coming. The party’s host is drunk: she’s laughing loud, touching everyone nearby, gesturing with the knife she’s using to cut whole pickles into spears for bloody marys. McKenzie should say something or take the…
Ronda BroatchEVEN THE DOGS The horses hid the day I walked out to pasture to catch my appaloosa. Ferro, eluding the drape of lead rope over his withers. I found him deep in woods I’d never entered, and slipped the…
AJ StrosahlN ̓X̌AX̌AITKʷ, 1984 A monster named Ogopogo lived in Lake Okanagan and Sylvester’s father Clyde had once seen it drown a bear, face first. It happened a few years before Sylvester was born, when Clyde was almost a boy…
Ann StoneyTHE OTHER SIDE When you wake up in the night, don’t flush or wash your hands. Go straight back to bed. This helps. You’ve been awake on and off. Dreams take the shape of lightning. Exaggerated versions of yourself,…
Jessica KlimeshWALKING ON THE FURNITURE In fourth grade, after Ellee and I learned how thin the crust was, how hot the mantle and core were, how fragile Earth in general was, we spoke in cautious whispers. What if? You think?…
Richard CasimirTIMOUN, or, LITTLE WORLD There is an image etched in my childhood memory from Haiti, which I find hard to erase. I admit I never try to block it out because it looks like a natural backdrop in my…
William EricksonBREAKFAST SOLILOQUY After breakfast I discovered an accretion disk around the empty container of raspberries, an iridescent plate of ablated drupelets circling recyclable clamshell like discarded astral projects on the kitchen counter. God is summer fruits and moldy gauze.…
Windy Lynn HarrisWE WERE NOT SO BIG There were three marriages and three sets of children, a pair for each union. For some reason, my father could only hold four children at a time. He told me this once, really…
Interview by Grace Singh SmithA CONVERSATION WITH NAMRATA PODDAR, AUTHOR OF BORDER LESS (7.13 Books) Full disclosure: I met Namrata Poddar—writer, editor, UCLA professor of writing and literature—in a room filled with Vermont sunlight, at Bennington Writing Seminars. But what…
Poetry by Rumi, translated by Haleh Liza Gafori, reviewed by Dylan Cook GOLD (NYRB) There’s no way to talk about Gold without sounding like a flower child spreading the gospel of peace and love, but is that such a bad…
Interview by Jean Hey, edited by Andrea CaswellA Conversation with Kathleen Courtenay Stone, author of the collective biography, THEY CALLED US GIRLS: STORIES OF FEMALE AMBITION FROM SUFFRAGE TO MAD MEN (Cynren Press) I met Kathleen Stone during a residency…
Nonfiction by Jennifer Niesslein, reviewed by Beth Kephart DREADFUL SORRY (Belt Publishing) I have been reading Jennifer Niesslein’s new collection of essays—Dreadful Sorry: Essays on an American Nostalgia—on a suddenly warm February afternoon. Outside on the deck I sit, the…
Fiction by Steven Schwartz, reviewed by Ellen Prentiss Campbell THE TENDEREST OF STRINGS (Regal House Publishing) Steven Schwartz’s new novel The Tenderest of Strings is the story of a marriage and a family in trouble, an exploration of how family…
Fiction by Laura Stanfill, reviewed by Beth Kephart SINGING LESSONS FOR THE STYLISH CANARY (Lanternfish Press) Picture a serinette: Music in a box. Notes arranged as pins. Crank it, and here it comes: the auditory sensation of someone whistling,…
Geoff WatkinsonCOSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS: On Lewis Hyde’s Advice for Creativity, and How I Became an Artist in the Modern World During the fall of my senior year of college, I took my first creative writing class and began to think that…
Poetry by Rosmarie Waldrop, reviewed by Candela Rivero THE NICK OF TIME (New Directions) The week before reading Nick of Time by Rosmarie Waldrop, an American poet, translator, and editor, I had a conversation with one of my best friends…
Katrina RobertsFrom KENNINGS Visual Erasures Katrina Roberts is the author of four books of poems and a chapbook, as well as editor of an anthology. Her manuscript LIKENESS, named a “manuscript of extraordinary merit” by Tupelo Press, was a finalist…
Brenda TaulbeeREGENERATION I want to put my head down …………………….and sleep like I used to know …………………….………..how to sleep. …………………….I want my brain to be less like a rained out game …………………….of hopscotch, the lines all running. I never want…
Andrea Lynn KoohiCLEANING HOUSE “Right there,” I say, pointing to the spider on the wall before leaving the kitchen. I’d rather not kill things, so I make my husband do it. My only complaint is that he doesn’t kill faster.…
Julie BeneshSHOW TUNES My ex- husband texting quotations, marked: “I know all about your standards…” Because July: ………….Music Man. last month was June’s ………….Carousel bustin’ out all over. (If I… ) Next month: ………….State Fair (Iowa, again, my home state).…
Virginia PetrucciREFLECTIONS April 2012 I do one bump right before I pee and then another after I’ve washed my hands. I suck the lingering white crumbs off the tip of my apartment key like a rapacious baby. I was anticipating…
Benedicte GrimaPUSHING AWAY THE SCUM I have no recollection of being bathed before the age of five. Doubtless, long forgotten nannies took charge of that. But growing up in an old farmhouse with a French mother and an unreliable well…
Christine MullerADULT SWIMS Someone must have peed in the pool. From the vigor of the lifeguards’ arms waving us out, I figured that someone must have peed a lot. I tried to keep my head above water as I made…
Kelley WhiteI AM LOSING MY HANDS. The right hand middle finger middle joint swollen. I can almost see it. And hurt. Three times I try to open a bottle and hurt. Struggle. Will I need to ask for help? And…
Eric Scot TryonTHE UNDERSIDE It was an exceptionally hot Saturday in April when my sister and I zombied our way through the tedious chore of packing Mom’s house. A twisted, cruel part of the grieving process, but we refused to…
Maggie HillHOOPS We’re going to jail for Christmas. Sing Sing. Ossining, New York. My brother Bobby and I ride in the back seat, the both of us held captive by images of branch, stone, sky going in the other direction.…
Bree SmithSHELTER First, the wound has to clot. In the hemostasis phase, blood vessels constrict to stop blood flow. Platelets fuse together to form a seal. Coagulation binds the wound on a molecular level. If a wound doesn’t clot, it…
Eliot LiA PLACE OF COMFORT Dustin, whose adolescent spine curved gently to the right. He hardly ever wore his corrective brace to school because it was so obvious under his polo shirt. Whose bedroom equaled comfort, Phoebe Cates on the…
Margaret MacInnisENOUGH When my infant daughter turns her face from my nipple and stiffens in my arms, I panic, imagining my lungs filling with water. I’m drowning on my living room floor, where I sit topless, still in my pajama…
Grace KennedyMAKING A CAKE Today is my father’s birthday and I am making a chocolate Guinness cake. I am making this cake by hand because I do not have a stand mixer and do not want to spend two-hundred and…
Gabriella SouzaLITTLE FEET Her mother used a foot mask. The package promised that in five days, the skin on her mother’s feet would molt, bubble white, and peel off in shreds, ziiiiiip. The daughter swore her mother’s eventual demise began…
Karin Wraley BarbeeTEENAGE ASTRONOMY Men watch her from her ceiling, Cepheus and Hercules, pressed there by a girl on the top bunk. Their luminous hands connect the dots of her now teenage body. The screen glows like the Northern Lights…
Lori Sambol BrodyPAS DE DEUX Alexander calls me to the front of the beginning pas de deux class to demonstrate positions. A tour de promenade: he coaches me to grip his hand and lift my leg in an arabesque, then…
Peter GrandboisBEND AND TOUCH THE GRASS Though the house is quiet another day nearly ………….snuffed out Shadows slipping through a bear’s skull, ………….half-buried Deer prints breaking the blossoming mud ………….at the water’s edge The cricket’s chirp limping through ………….the undecided…
Cassie BurkhardtTHE TRUTH When I was in eighth grade, I had a terrible eating disorder and was hospitalized for most of it. When that didn’t work, I was admitted to a treatment center in Utah called The Center for Change,…
Cassie BurkhardtSPONTANEOUS BUNGEE JUMP IN SWITZERLAND Twenty-six years old. Pink cutoffs. Barefoot. Day trip to Lugano with friends when we see a sign with an arrow: James Bond Golden Eye Cliff Jump. No one else wants to do it, but…
Amy SavageWHY DON’T YOU SHUT UP, WHY DON’T YOU SPEAK UP? “What do you call the men? Ballerinos?” Sophie’s mother asked at intermission, frowning. “Some of them need another layer down there. You can see all their parts.” She ran…
Dhaea KangMASQUERADE We’ve just arrived at prom and already I want to leave. Should we take a photo? Chris asks. I clock the long line, my classmates barely recognizable without their signature Hollister t-shirts and hoodies, skin-tight low rise jeans.…
Kim MagowanCONCERNING RITA HAYWORTH “So what do you do?” George says, then winces. “Sorry! Reductive question.” “At least you waited until we each had a glass of wine.” Cora examines her hands, the body part she used to be most…
Maddie BaxterTHE DOCTOR WILL SEE YOU NOW My left leg is an eroded coastline. Squeeze my thigh to feel the plateau of un-muscle. Shaving my legs for the first time at 13 was pressing a blade to rubber. If my…
Beth Kephart and Stephanie WeaverWANTED: TWO WRITERS MUSE ON THE ART OF SAYING NO They want you. They want you for free. Because you are wise, they say. Because you know things. Because they want their people to know your…
Poetry by Eric Morales-Franceschini, reviewed by Juniper Jordan Cruz AUTOPSY OF A FALL (Newfound Press) Autopsy of a Fall by Eric Morales-Franceschini is many things at once: nostalgic and bitter, analytical and volatile, epic and intimate. It is a masterful…