Beth KephartBE INSPIRED I know. I know. So grotesquely obvious. Except for the essential sequitur: Be inspired by what? The metronome flick of your puppy’s tail? The mellifluous hum of the antique AC? The letter m, lowercase, written, for the…
Ky LohrenzCONTAINMENT FAILURE At the party, I watch drunk men piss in a sink & all I see is freedom. How’d I get here— eyeing their semis, feigning indifference, waiting for the rain to stop. Tell me how it feels.…
Samantha PadgettAN UNNAMED ESSAY IN WHICH THE WORLD ENDS, BUT I’M TOLD EVERYTHING IS OKAY My mother is panicking. I know this despite her insistence that she isn’t afraid. After days of listening to the newscaster detail the refrigerator trucks…
J. Bradley MinnickTHE BANKRUPT CIRCUS Before the Bankrupt Circus came to town, my bud, Decie, and I spent our summer lunch breaks arguing about the merits of olive loaf sandwiches while we sat on the curb in the midst of…
Lynn FingerIT NEVER SEEMED WRONG TO LOVE YOU, IT’S JUST THAT WE WERE HERONS It never seemed wrong to love you, but I think we knew it wasn’t a fit. Still, we pitch a rocky tent in the sugar pines…
Carolyn AlessioCONTRAINDICATED My mother once found opiates in the bottom of a used necklace box. She’d heard a clicking sound while lifting out the gold-plated necklace she had just purchased at a dying mall near her home. A half-dozen pills…
Mikki AronoffLIFT It’s our birthday month, leaves relinquishing their hold, and I’m thinking back to that rodeo, both of us burning for cowboys and leather, unaware of the suffering of cows, and afterwards, you climbed then tumbled into the bullpen,…
Rebecca Grossman-KahnWHEN YOU CALL HIS MOTHER FROM THE PSYCH UNIT When you call his mother, give yourself time. A half hour, at least. Give up on the idea of beating rush hour traffic home. Swipe your badge and enter through…
Sarah MyersTHE RIDE You’re buying tampons, brushing your hair, cleaning the crud off the kitchen table, and the sight of your own stupid fingers reminds you that the bottom has dropped out of everything. Then you’re talking to a colleague…
Jennifer PopaRE-MARK THE BODY, BUT KNOW IT IS LITTLE MORE THAN KINDLING When I wake, my moles are retreating across my drool-stained pillow, into my sheets and the afghan tangled around my ankles. Last week my ears began ticking, keeping…
Tom SokolowskiSUNK BY MINES Driving to Cascades Park, I pass The Florida Bar and the Smokey Hollow Commemoration and Community Garden where, on a bench facing Franklin Boulevard, Lonely Man, with a knapsack beside him, is always grinding rotten kumquats…
Matthew BurrellFIVE SECONDS J.D. stood up without his grenade pin. We were heading toward the Guadalupe range after a live fire exercise in White Sands Training Grounds, otherwise known as the ‘Sand Box’, during a hot afternoon in July 1998…
Leonard KressCOLLOQUY OF YOUNG MOTHERS ON VENANGO STREET By one a.m. they hoard the crossroad stoops, spotlit by squealing cars and vans, each beam gilding an icon nimbus in mounting loops of hair. They gaze impassive at the stream of…
Emily SteinbergGLASS HOUSE A Visual Narrative Emily Steinberg is a multi-disciplinary artist with a focus on painting and visual narrative. Her work has been published by The New Yorker and included in several anthologies. Steinberg teaches visual narrative at Penn…
Jody M KeeneOUR HANDS TOO SMALL We come home for Thanksgiving to watch our mom die. We get there to find the blinds drawn and the fridge empty except for cans of Ensure and Kraft singles. “We’re going to order…
Laura RubyAMONG THE WRECKAGE 1. Earth after the asteroid strikes, leaving the Chicxulub crater twelve miles deep. 2. The dinosaurs, after the fallout dusts them off the map. 3. A mammoth sinking in the La Brea Tar Pit. 4. Neanderthals.…
Pat RyanTHE ACTIVIST IN THE NURSING HOME It was Monday morning, a few minutes shy of noon, when I entered the Visitors’ Room of the extended care facility where I was embedded. The room is square and high-ceilinged, with a…
Grayson Thompsonjuniper poplar I knew a guy who lost over 100 lbs by running away from himself he taught me to start small like a building and eventually turn the world over with my feet the first block felt like…
Brendan StephensHELL’S MOUNTAIN Long ago, after I died, I found myself alone in a vast wasteland with nothing on the horizon except a single imposing mountain gray with distance. This wasn’t paradise. I’d never been a believer, just an ordinary…
Jon ChopanAN EXAMINATION OF THE TEXT AS IT PERTAINS TO THE DIVORCE AND SUBSEQUENT ROMANCE BETWEEN CHARACTERS XX AND XY Rabid ……….Which is the only way to describe XY’s love, even now, when XX is gone, when she is off…
Andrew Michael JohnsonDUNES DAY In the summer of 2020 we fled the confinements of our house in Kansas City and drove to Colorado. After the first three months of pandemic lockdown, my wife, three young children, and I needed to…
Lauren BakerYOUR BEST IMPRESSION OF AN EARNEST MAN There was a Post-it with a heart drawn on it stuck to my desktop computer. I folded the paper square into halves, fourths, and eighths and scratched at the residue it left…
Gillian PerrySOMATICS It had been a month since my miscarriage, two weeks since I decided to take my maternity leave anyway. I justify it like this—I’m not leaving the office for maternity, maternity had left me instead. Davis leaves for…
Pat JamesonDISTRACTED That afternoon was the afternoon I followed the starlings across town and accosted a distracted driver, but before that, me and the other irregulars were at Joe’s explaining to a new recruit how you could tell whether you…
Interview by Michael McCarthyAN INTERVIEW WITH TOM DALEY, AUTHOR OF FAR CRY (Ethel Zine) Tom Daley is Boston’s bard. His dedication to the craft should be obvious to anybody who’s spent an hour with him, for in that hour, he…
Andrea Caswell5 TIPS FOR REVISING Revision is an important but often-dreaded stage of the writing process. Having to revise can feel like facing a harsh reality after the freedom of free-writes, and of first drafts bursting with inspiration. But if…
Tricia ParkTIPS TO UNSTUCK YOUR WRITINGSecond in a 5-part series Sometimes, the hardest part is getting started. We get overwhelmed by self-doubt and too many (or too few) ideas as we sit, staring at the blank page. Often, we just…
Tricia ParkTIPS TO UNSTUCK YOUR WRITINGFirst in a 5-part series Sometimes, the hardest part is getting started. We get overwhelmed by self-doubt and too many (or too few) ideas as we sit, staring at the blank page. What if I…
John FriedTHE FICTION MULTIVERSE, or What Happens Next. Or next, or next… In the brilliant British playwright Caryl Churchill’s one-act play “Heart’s Desire,” a mother and father sit in their kitchen, awaiting the arrival of their grown daughter from a…
Interview by Hannah Felt GarnerAn Interview with Author Phoebe Reeves on Two New Publications I Think of My Poems as Being Products of Sound— Phoebe Reeves Phoebe Reeves is a poet and an English professor at the University of Cincinnati…
Jacqueline EllisFLIGHT PATHS December 2021: I give my dad a project: tell me what you remember about making wine with your friend Franco, back when we lived in Peterborough. The task distracts him while he waits for biopsy results. Suspected…
David SheskinArt That Speaks: Digital images These images come from a large body of works which I refer to as Art That Speaks which involve the creative integration of art and text. My Art That Speaks images, which must be…
Rita Mendes-FlohrTHE SECRET ANNEX In all those years we have lived in this the old house in town so close to the sea, I have never been able to get near the beautiful turquoise water behind the row of houses…
Christine H. ChenMARK MY WORDS Ah Ma tells me what a lucky girl I am, I am the only child, Ah Ba spoils me with toys I break within a week, dresses I dirty within minutes, shoes I muddy after…
A. J. JaconoSAHARA DREAMS The first night of the tour, after the guides had hitched the camels and secured the mess tent and laid out the steaming tagines and plates of couscous, Cash decided to make some friends because he…
Robin KinzerMESENTERIC PANNICULITIS AT NINE MONTHS Today, they applied electrodes to my abdomen, then told me to slowly up the voltage. With each added jolt, it felt more like a hundred bumblebees burrowing beneath my scarred and dimpled skin. I…
Meg LeDucWITNESS TO THE ARIA A sculpture soars in the sky of Meijer Gardens, red as a hummingbird heart, rising over the pinprick of a groundskeeper below. Of the painted scarlet steel of his public art, Alexander Liberman once said,…
Erin Pesutchurch There came a time about three years after we moved to Vermont when I decided I wanted to go to church again. Really what I wanted was to go to church at Christmas. Really what I wanted was…
Anne PanningMAGIC WINDOW (CHASING HOME) What did you think when you cupped your hands against the glass and peered inside? Did you think the old wavy Victorian glass was a portal to the past? Did you see your mother in…
A. C.THE PHANTOM BABY The baby dies on garbage day. It’s a Monday, very cloudy, with a sixteen percent chance of rain. There’s a little cough, a little spit, then nothing. The collection truck comes on time. It was not…
Yujia LiPISSER CLAM Learned today that clams break with the slightest pressure between forefinger and thumb. I jumped at the crack, admiring a broken shell, gray and soft and more vulnerable than I— a bed of them clamoring northeast, pressed…
Meg PokrassSHAPES He is kissing his wife goodnight on the cheek as she slips off to the spare bedroom with Tylenol and a hot water bottle. “I smell like a seal,” she says. Before that, she’d been at her surfing…
Wendy MacIntyreTHE TATTOO Wita’s mother had a tattoo that colonized her left forearm. Six words, sinister and enigmatic: “Keep me safe and kill me.” The dyes that needled this sentence into her flesh were sea-green and Prussian blue. Wita was…
Mark WilliamsPARAÍSO Henry Hoover is in his bedroom, mastering the G-chord on his Martin acoustic, when his father walks in and brings up Science Camp. With Henry’s sophomore year of high school behind him and all of summer ahead, he…
Jordan RanftCREATION MYTH WITH CHORUS OF WORMS IN MY BRAIN nothing springs forward it spills as it would from a drain pipe or falling through a solid sheet of glass. there may have been a man with a spear. you…
Thomas JohnsonSHUTTING DOWN Stevie watched the road. Driving right now made him nervous. Cars moved tightly in each direction on the highway. Stevie’s wife, Ruth, was next to him in the passenger seat, and their friend, Helen, shared the backseat…
Gay DeganiBULLY BOYS Her brothers are rough-and-tumble types roaming the streets after Mother and Father go to bed. They are expert at sneaking out, know every creaky floorboard, every groan in the front door hinge. Robbie greased their window sash.…
Mary LewisRED SUN Using the full twelve-foot length of the handle, Jake pushed the floater over the last slab of new concrete, then pulled it slowly back towards him. This was his favorite part of the job because after all…
Samantha NeugebauerVILLAINS Back then it was impossible to do anything with my mother sleeping. In the evenings, we watched Prancer and ate turkey clubs; in the mornings, we drank coffee, then Bloody Marys. It was when I worked in the…
Megan E. O’LaughlinMEDITATING IN HELL Age 24. The Gambia, West Africa. I do not pray five times a day like the people in the village. When I duck into my little house, the girls ask where are you going? I…