Poems by Nathan Lipps, reviewed by Dakotah Jennifer BUILT AROUND THE FIRE (Stephen F. Austin State University Press) “Mourning doves linger beneath the basket of seeds waiting, discussing applications of empathy or economics, what poverty means” Miles to go before…
Rob GreeneTHE DEVIL FORM As a graduate student, my preparations to teach poetry to undergraduates made me hyperfocus on craft, and I ultimately decided to begin with teaching how to make an image. My full understanding of the makings of…
Alex Barr ZORAN Even in the distance you looked foreign. Hair frizzed up above a frown, clown’s blob of a nose. Going very slowly, considering the relationship of the bicycle to each building you passed. Yes, a frown—you were always…
Harrison Candelaria Fletcher CREATION MYTHS 1 – Coyote grasps at straws within adobe. careful as threading. an eye of a needle. seeking a key. within river clay. opening a door. finding a face. where to belong. where to rest. beating.…
Elaine Chekich ACCIDENTAL ROOMMATES Honorable Mention of the 2024 Cleaver Emerging Artist Award I hardly knew Quibble when I started sleeping on his couch. We’d served under Lt. Pablo in Afghanistan, but mostly we were on different details and didn’t…
Victoria Korth BEDSIDE When I say darkness, I mean everything I don’t understand, my mother’s breath in mine before I was born. In the dark, her breath pauses and mine goes on, pacing in its neutral candor. Can it be…
Meg Yardley ARE THEY OR AREN’T THEY? Leah was standing in the feminine products aisle. At least, she had always thought of it as the feminine products aisle until just now, when she realized it was also the condoms aisle.…
Robert Garner McBrearty GETTING OUT Everyone is getting out. They’re getting out. My dentist is getting out. The letters are familiar: After over thirty years of service, loving every moment of it, so very grateful to all of you… But…
Patrick Strickland SCREAMING EAST ON I-10 I just want to get home, but home’s never quite where I left it. After work tonight, I glide along the streets of Simi Valley, nearly nodding off a time or two, in search…
Autumn H. Thomas BODY DOUBLE A productivity strategy often used by people with ………….inattentiveness adj. ………….………….pollen sticking to stigma ………….………….brushed by genetic chance ………….………….the limb of the bumblebee ………….………….lackadaisically’d rigour mortis Coming home to the mansion of my mind Unable…
Kate E. Lore FLAME Honorable Mention of the 2024 Cleaver Emerging Artist Award The flame tastes rock but they don’t like it. Spit and sputter, they leave behind a black trail burn, an imitation of shadow, crude like a child’s…
J.D. Isip WHAT USED TO BE MCCARRAN AIRPORT, LAS VEGAS The Spring Mountains out in the distance, if you’re lucky you’ll catch a sunset, the diminished edifices of glistening cassinos refracting a little of the glory in their windows where,…
Mark Liebenow FRAGILE, FRACTURE, FEAR Every evening, I make spaghetti and try out different seasonings in the sauce, including hot spices from the southwest, which you would have hated, or I pull out leftover chicken and eat it cold in…
Ash Trebisacci VOICEMA[LE] TO MYSELF Honorable Mention of the 2024 Cleaver Emerging Artist Award There’s this podcast that I love. The host’s voice is unmistakably, gorgeously trans. It purrs, crackles, ekes out phrases like a song I know by heart…
SV Bertrand TELL ME IF IT HURTS It happens again. But this time I am not busy dying, so I get to see what happens after. Dad is getting the car refueled, and I am sitting in the back seat while…
Brooke Harries TWO POEMS Transformer Miss him, …………or drinking coffee in bed, reading with a lamp at the bedside. Read an interview with Lou Reed. The one …………where he stops answering by saying Nothing I feel like talking about. Make…
Kindall Fredrickswhere has amelia gone where has she been amelia quiet as an attic ……………………….where is she? where is she? we crawl into her and chew ………………………………………………..make a clergy ………….of our teeth we search god hung over us fat and…
Elisabetta La Cava MEMORIZING ROMAN ROADS In the front yard of my grandmother’s house in Venezuela, behind a four-foot fence, stood a white metal pole. She didn’t hang a flag on it. I was eight years old and didn’t care…
Marlene Tholl BABY DOLL Shanty Point Labor Day. Surging swells, pale over dark, an outlook off into forever. My husband Augustus was surfcasting for striper with an eel on the hook. He pointed out the now mostly submerged rocks that…
Rick Andrews TRASH I’ve got bags full of trash she touched: a pamphlet from a state fair pumpkin carving booth. The pithy tops to Snapple bottles and Jones sodas. Maps, maps of museums, of Delaware, of Boston, maps of Paris,…
J. Bradley Minnick MS. ROBBERS Ms. Robbers taught seventh-grade Spanish at Mann Middle School and was the reason for Bernie Markee’s infamy. Ms. Robbers was white, tall, unmarried, called herself a “Progressivist,” and believed she spoke Castilian Spanish perfectly, pronouncing…
Meg LeDuc APPETITE Honorable Mention of the 2024 Cleaver Emerging Artist Award I have an insatiable appetite for self-loathing. I hate my body’s neediness, the way it presses its wants upon me, always petitioning for more, more, more. I hate…
Anna Tomasulo SMALL WORDS We sit at the bar. Our glasses sit at the bar. He and I sat first and they followed. Something about the night makes me want to talk. So, talk I do, about other hes and…
MaxieJane Frazier WE LAUGH After Sarah Freligh When we’re twenty, we laugh and laugh. For the men surrounding us as if we’re gold at the end of a rainbow. For the slurred compliments and bestial breath. From the corner booth:…
Mike Itaya BAD LOVE JR. It was unseasonable noon in August, and I already missed the tangy summer where everything grew like weeds and everyone who was anyone got twitchy pants. Up at Ezekiel Remedial School, I was a no-show…
Finley K Foster CAPTAIN JONAH I miss the set up and the punchline, but all around the table people are laughing. I can’t force a laugh, not a believable one, so I throw on a face, one that says “gotta…
Alex BarrDUST ISN’T DEATH Those abandoned stories and poems gathering dust in a drawer—they may look like fossils but what if they’re embryos? I’d like to share my experience which I hope will be useful and encouraging. It’s about kissing…
Andrea CaswellA CRAFT CHAT WITH T.S. BENDER T.S. Bender’s short story “Miguel’s Sancho” (Issue 45) is a skilled exploration of belonging and isolation, love and loss, and the darker sides of the human heart. In this Craft Chat, senior fiction…
Kathryn Silver-HajoINTERVIEW YOUR CHARACTERS Sometimes when I want to get to know a character better or they just aren’t ringing true on the page, I request an interview. Like, really. Depending on who your character is, you might have a…
An Interview by Benjamin Woodard, edited by Emma Parzybok AN INTERVIEW WITH KRISTEN VAN NEST, AUTHOR OF WHERE TO NEST Kristen Van Nest’s debut memoir, Where to Nest: A Global Search for Love, Cheap Wine and a Place to Belong…
Andrea CaswellA CRAFT CHAT WITH SOFI GUVEN Sofi Guven’s short story “Proximity” (Issue 45) is an exploration of people’s boundaries, both emotional and physical, in a world in which we are all connected. In this chat with fiction editor Andrea…
Andrea CaswellVULNERABILITY, AUDACITY, AND FREEDOM: A CRAFT CHAT WITH MARIANA SABINO In Mariana Sabino’s short story “The Undercurrent” (Issue 38), locals at a bar in a beach town are fascinated by, and unwelcoming to, a widow who arrives in their…
Talya JankovitsTHE DENOUEMENT: HOW DOES IT END FOR REJECTED WRITERS? I have been having a hard time with endings lately. Poems, short stories, dare I admit, essays. I’ve been considering this a lot, what this could mean, all these unfinished…
Ona Gritz WHAT CONSULTING A PSYCHIC DID FOR MY MEMOIR—AND FOR ME About a decade ago, compelled to write a memoir about the sister I lost to violence thirty years earlier, I began the painful process of investigating my own…
Check out Beth’s upcoming live masterclass, The Writing is in the Details, Sunday July 28, 2-4 PM ET. Can’t make it? A recording will be sent to all registrants. Beth Kephart DETAILS, DETAILS, DETAILS The artisans of the telling detail…
A Writing Tip by Karen RileTHE PAST IS PERFECT You wrote a paragraph. You were writing a novel all summer. You had written the first hundred pages on a bus. You had been writing the same old story for years.…
A Novel by E.J. Koh, reviewed by Julia Hou THE LIBERATORS (Tin House Books) E. J. Koh’s latest novel, The Liberators, begins with language, then war, recounting the early memories of Yohan, a newly widowed father in the midst of…
A Writing Tip by Federico EscobarDIM THE SCREEN TO TURN OFF YOUR BRAIN There is a well-intentioned person who gets in the way of my ideas bursting onto the page. This person is eager to please, wants to make sure…
Andrea CaswellA CRAFT CHAT WITH KIM MAGOWAN In her story “The Back Nine” (Issue 45), Kim Magowan shows us a character with a growing list of personal losses, trying to come to terms with the lost connections that still haunt…
A Writing Tip by Clifford ThompsonDUALITY IN THE PERSONAL ESSAY Duality is the soul of the personal essay. I sometimes tell students that while the province of speeches and op-ed articles is certainty, the domain of the personal essay is…
Stories by Shannon Sanders, reviewed by Kayla McCall COMPANY (Graywolf Press) My family’s matriarch has a ritual when company comes to visit. She chases carefully-swept corners with lemon-scented cleaners. The vacuum hums over the rug, then the hardwood, then the…
Alina Pleskova and Kimberly Ann Southwick, edited by Hannah Felt GarnerALINA PLESKOVA AND KIMBERLY ANN SOUTHWICK WANT YOU TO DIY IT THIS POETRY MONTH Alina: Kimberly Ann Southwick and I have traveled in the same extended poetry circles for about…
A Conversation with Cleaver Senior Nonfiction Editor Sydney Tammarine DUALITY IN NONFICTION Estimated reading time: 1 minute What does duality in creative nonfiction mean to you? Do you have any favorite essays or memoirs that explore duality? When I think…
A Writing Tip by Snowden WrightTRIAL AND ERROR At an Oxford, Mississippi, courthouse last summer, I sat in on the trial for the most recent person to try to assassinate my father, a circuit court judge. Things went poorly for…
David Galef NO SURPRISE FOR THE WRITER? WHAT A RELIEF FOR ME. Robert Frost’s famous line of writing advice, “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader,” comes not from a poem but from his essay “The…
Nicole BrogdonTHE POD I never felt enough eyes on me, never enough love. Never enough arms, wrapping round my body. Nor hands, chopping vegetables for soup. Not enough healthy backs, moving my furniture. More hands, putting on clean sheets—floral sheets,…
Kim MagowanTHE BACK NINE The email is from Marianne’s boarding school classmate Harrison McBee, then captain of the lacrosse team, now an investment banker living with his husband in Manhattan; the subject heading is “Sad News.” Reluctantly, Marianne opens it.…
T.S. BenderMIGUEL’S SANCHO It was some point early in August, a Thursday or Friday, some point at the end of the week that Miguel didn’t show up to work. And that morning, as the sun streamed into the garage of…
Katie TonellatoBABY, SWEETHEART, HONEY Honorable Mention of the 2024 Cleaver Emerging Artist Award When I was young, they called me baby, sweetpea, honey, cherry pie, chubs. So often they called me these things, that when they called me my name,…
Julian ShendelmanSUSPENSION POINTS “I suppose you could DM,” Marine said, staring into her clipboard. “Direct message?” “Dungeon monitor. You essentially walk around making sure people aren’t openly bleeding on the carpet. It’s a violation of our lease. Here.” She handed…