John Wall BargerTHE ELEPHANT OF SILENCE Je suis maitre du silence —Rimbaud, “Enfance” I. At fifty, in the middle of the COVID pandemic, I drove my 1989 BMW motorcycle from Philadelphia to The Hambidge Center in the mountains of northeast…
Mark DanowskyYOU ARE A POET (Even When You Aren’t Writing) In Poetics, Aristotle essentially defines a poet as someone who has “an eye for resemblances.” This is a nice reminder to look up, both literally and metaphorically, look around, look…
Poetry by Andrew Levy, reviewed by Johnny Payne ARTIFICE IN THE CALM DAMAGES (Chax) The traditional identification of poet and prophet is acceptable only in the sense that the poet is about as slow in reflecting his epoch as the…
Laraine HerringSPECULATIVE MEMOIR: MAKING THE INVISIBLE VISIBLE I was eight years old when the tree spoke to me. My dad had just gotten out of the hospital after a near-fatal heart attack, and I would ride my bike down to…
Nonfiction by Patricia Hanlon, reviewed by Michael McCarthy SWIMMING TO THE TOP OF THE TIDE (Bellevue Literary Press) Six Ways to Look at a Marsh Swimming to the Top of the Tide, Patricia’s Hanlon’s delightful debut book, follows her through…
Terry RobertsRESEARCH AND WRITING: The Warp and Woof of Historical Fiction When I stand before a crowd of curious readers and talk about my novels, which are generally understood to be “historical fiction,” invariably someone asks a version of the…
Fiction by Natalie Bakopoulos, reviewed by Aleksia Mira Silverman SCORPIONFISH (Tin House) Scorpionfish by Natalie Bakopoulos begins with a return. Mira, a Greek-born academic in her late thirties, arrives in Athens after her parents’ funeral. She must sort out the…
Fiction by Nana Nkweti, reviewed by Juliana Lamy WALKING ON COWRIE SHELLS (Graywolf Press) The ten stories in Nana Nkweti’s debut short story collection Walking on Cowrie Shells offer tableaus of Blackness that are as varied as they are vivid.…
Dena SofferEMBRACE THE NELSON: Going Beyond the Pretty Narrative Voice In my first graduate writing workshop, David Gates told a true story about Raymond Carver working on a piece of writing that wasn’t going well. Carver worked and worked, experiencing…
Gayathri PrabhuNOTES TO A YOUNG WRITER: On (Re)writing, (Re)vision, Editing, and Other Random Terms The young writer asks me, the mentor whose name is vertical on book spines, a question about writing they wish would go away. No doubt they…
Beth KephartTHE FUNNY IN MEMOIR: Alison Bechdel, Dinty W. Moore, and Trey Popp A few years ago, a friend who had first come to know me through my books and was slowly coming to know me through myself—our emails, our…
Sara DavisEVER GIVEN Because the spring tide comes in on its own time, because the earth goes on turning and the moon goes on circling around us and the ocean eddies unevenly but inevitably between them, because the seawater rises…
Anika PavelAN UNFULFILLED DREAM Through the COVID-19 lockdown in spring 2020, people were buying everything in sight. During a visit to my local supermarket, the empty shelves were familiar. In my youth, in communist Czechoslovakia, empty shelves were a norm,…
Courtney Elizabeth Youngcleave. Here are the ways I have heard it happens: in bed, waking to wheezing, breathing in loose clumps lining your pillow. Out with friends, falling into your Cobb salad, your Pinot. In the pool, raking waters in…
Savannah Slonemanic / depressive i only exist in spectrum extremes floating amongst personality binaries hard cut offs…….. prescription intimacy learning to top the in betweens dusting for my own fingerprints in a house made up entirely of stained glass ………………………of…
Marsha BlitzerNITS The native mums told me it was inevitable, ……………………………………………………..nobody’s fault. ………………..In the changing room ………………………..……………………………they swapped ………………..uniform jumpers and caps. Soon I saw my sons scratching their skulls. ………………..Sesame seeds, each louse ……………………………………………………..had claws attached to hair ………………..where…
Lindsay RutherfordHOW A GIRL GROWS UP I don’t remember who suggests skinny dipping (me?), but none of us have our suits on anymore. At least I don’t. I am twelve, and we are at a friend’s remote lake property for…
Tricia ParkDOUBLE FOLDED Every Korean girl I know freaks out about going…
Marc TweedTHE SKULL Marv. Teenagers found him washed up on the sand, bloated and bright in his favorite Hawaiian shirt. A crowd gathered and called the police, but not before those who found him took his wallet, wedding ring, car…
Lizzy LemieuxLOAVES My daughter tells me her dream while I pack her lunchbox. What a terrifying nightmare! I say and kiss the top of her head. She narrows her eyes. Mom, she says, It was not a nightmare. It was…
Esther RaSHELTER Every evening before we climb into the car, I tap the hood politely, and wait for the street cats to leap out underneath—gray cloudbursts of mist- matted fur, supple flash of muscle and sinew. Even in the winter,…
Diana RickardSMALL CONSOLATION you make an offering to posterity ghastly aesthetic cauterizes the virile there is a corniness to the late wave and you absorb because of resemblance because of what drifts and sifts through the sieve all of it …
Emily SteinbergTHE RECKONING The Reckoning is a 22-page full-color visual narrative, that illustrates our planet’s stark environmental crisis on a visceral gut level in words and images. It explores how our sustained misuse of natural resources is intertwined and connected,…
Christine MullerANTONY AND CLEOPATRA They sat the way they wished they could always sit: together, with wine at their fingertips, a cooling breeze in the air, and the fading day’s light sparkling like magic across the terrace’s gold fixtures. Cleopatra…
Kim Magowan and Michelle RossNIGHT VISION They were cooling off in Amanda’s pool—three women submerged to their necks. With the moon behind them and in the ungenerous glow of the stringed lights on Amanda’s porch, Amanda’s and Louise’s faces were…
Meg Pokrass & Rosie GarlandMICE The cork shoots out of the bottle, bounces off the wall and loses itself behind the sofa. Don’t bother, she says. It’s too late. He’s already clasping the curved arm of the Chesterfield and trying…
Joe LugaraDIGITAL PAINTINGS These works are from two distinct series of digital paintings, Framework and Dark Oddities. I enjoy the clash of the man-made and the organic, the grids contrasting with the shape-shifting blobs. The Framework series asks one of…
Courtney Thorne-SmithGIRL ON FIRE She is bent over the sink. The ends of her long dark hair dip in and out of the bubbles as she circles the sponge slowly over the already clean pan. “What’s wrong?” he asks. “Nothing,”…
Soheon RheePAPER MACHE ON THE DRAIN The day of Chuseok, I remember that you wanted to cut my dress and how you made confetti of silk on the basin with the remaining the cloth of my hanbok jagged. I had…
Dylan CookPLENTY OF FISH Matt felt the morning dew jump against his legs as his feet flattened the seagrass in his way. He had his fishing pole slung over his shoulder like a bindle and his tackle box swinging at…
KC PedersenA PIERCE OF ANGELS Light airs! Light airs! A pierce of angels! Theodore Roethke …it is not the skill of the hand / That writes poetry, but water, trees, / And the sky which is clear to us even…
Tracy Rothschild LynchSPONGE BATH The no-nonsense, middle-aged Filipino nurse tells me, pushing up her smudged glasses, that I need to clean up a bit down there. She waves her tiny hands dramatically around her own groin area and then shuffles…
A Graphic Narrative by Myriam Steinberg, illustrated by Christache, reviewed by Brian Burmeister CATALOGUE BABY: A MEMOIR OF INFERTILITY (Page Two) The graphic memoir Catalogue Baby shares the deeply personal fertility journey of Myriam Steinberg. Compelled to leave her career,…
Poetry by Ae Hee Lee, reviewed by Juniper Jordan Cruz DEAR BEAR (Platypus Press) Dear Bear begins with the gripping dedication, “For Daniel, to the end,” and from there, takes its readers to the end of the world it introduces.…
Nonfiction by Krys Malcolm Belc, reviewed by Beth Kephart THE NATURAL MOTHER OF THE CHILD (Counterpoint Press) Krys Malcolm Belc—nonbinary, transmasculine, and talented—begins his memoir with an Irish dance—“all jumping and pounding, the tight black laces against my calves, the…
Ellen Prentiss CampbellRESONANT PLACES: Houses We Live in, Homes that Live in Our Writing Memory and imagination cast spells. Fiction is inspired by places as well as temps perdue. Many of us have dreamed last night that we went back…
Marnie GoodfriendFUND WHAT YOU FEAR I lie in bed, my eyes fixated on the fruit trees outside my bare windows. I do not have insomnia. I am bone tired. Recently, my pain is nocturnal. My body waits until my head…
Kate PetersonAT A CAFÉ IN VICTORIA, BC TWO GREY-HAIRED MEN TALK ABOUT LOVE She’s in the garden all the time and I’ve got my bridge, and the next thing you know you’re living different lives. One asks the other, If…
James MillerLAST GESTURE We eat on the porch when evening heat recedes. Lamps hang from the oak. The Conrad novel rests between us—eighty-nine pages left to speak aloud. As you reach out for a drink, we see a tiny frog,…
Constance McBrideSENSITIVE SKIN: Ceramics “Everyone wants to have an illusion of themselves, that they’re a bit attractive, but the older I get it seems more important to be absolutely honest and direct.” — Chantal Joffe When I was a kid…
Laura TanenbaumLITTLE GRIEF SONG, JULY 2020 “But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged into our personal weather They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove along the shore, through the rages of fog where…
Nick OlsonSAN ANDREAS HEAVEN I remember back in the day Nick used to try to get to Heaven. Heaven was a glitched-out place in San Andreas where nothing made sense or seemed quite real, and Nick would come home most…
SENSITIVE SKIN: Ceramics by Constance McBride “Everyone wants to have an illusion of themselves, that they’re a bit attractive, but the older I get it seems more important to be absolutely honest and direct.” – Chantal Joffe When I was…
Jennifer HaydenFALL OF MAN a visual narrative Scroll down for an interview with Jennifer Hayden by Cleaver Visual Narrative Editor Emily Steinberg Hayden is the author of The Story of My Tits, the Eisner-nominated graphic memoir about her experience with…
Valerie LovelandI AM THAT GROUP OF PICTURES OF SPIDERWEBS MADE BY SPIDERS ON DIFFERENT DRUGS Scientists call everything an experiment, …………………….even when ……iit is actually a meme even when …………………………..it is actually a spiderweb beauty contest Scientists don’t realize even…
Ann de ForestAMMONITES mountains once were ocean evidence coils beneath our feet prehistoric curlicues not yet nautilus not yet snail not yet calcified turban washed up on the beach ………………………void of any tender ……………………………….creature barely old enough to remember tasmanian…
Ali KojakI’M NOT SORRY They say I should write you a letter. As a goodbye, they smile sadly, for closure. They say closure like it’s a literal thing I can touch, can put in my Amazon cart and click, it’s…
Lorette C. LuzajicLEPIDOPTERA Pheasant Falls, end of the line. There is only a diner and smoke shop at either end of a triplet of small houses. On the other side, city-potted geraniums and a path to the waterfalls. An arrow…
Jason JobinTRADE CRAFT On the walk home from the bakery, spelt loaf in hand, I look back—because this is the part of town where you look back—and see a guy. He’s late thirties, soft looking, salt and pepper hair, very…
Michelle Renee HoppeFISH FEEL NO PAIN My little brother held a trout, a rainbow burning bright enough to eclipse reflections. The fish did not reflect, but the stream did, and he took a mighty brown watery rock to spill the…