Vivian Faith Prescott The muddy tide rising to shore should carry you downriver by now. But, I imagine your scow wedged between cottonwoods on the riverbank branches shoved through your chest motor revving. Maybe your skiff is jammed on the sandbar, and you’ve stumbled over the side, whirlpools sucking your rubber-booted feet. But here, … Read more
Stephen Page Last Night I Dreamed Rain The clouds quickened under a wax moon, then settled around plastic palm fronds. My truck stuck in river bed three, and just like the time it slipped into a ditch, I tried to push it out alone, putting it in gear, then straining under the … Read more
Nancy Long i. Harmony A fine Chinese meal my mother said is made of five flavors, a blending of elemental portions. What is sour, she said, if not the flesh of plum? To know sour is to taste green watering across your tongue, to feel the force of wood striking your open … Read more
Kacee Belcher After the wolf cub slipped from his mother into the den with his brothers and sisters, he hunched down in terror as he lay on the cold ground, his legs not yet working. His eyes, still closed, felt heavy with the placental fluid that had mixed with the dirt that surrounded the … Read more
Mathieu Cailler Penn continued to drive through the night. Snow and gales of wind assailed his SUV as he barreled towards home, his foot steady on the gas, his mitts positioned firmly at ten and two. Heat billowed from the vents on the dashboard and moved loose strands of hair … Read more
Jane Cassady Is there anything we can go in and get for you before we board it up? Before the window plywood gets its eventual graffiti, before you wash the clothes in Pine Sol to get out the smell of smoke, before a loving friend helps fold those clothes, so specifically and kindly, … Read more
Jane Cassady But here it is. As we walk the summer camp kindergarten through third grade down the street to Pleasant Playground for their weekly swim, the kids are in their two quiet lines, listening for traffic and blue jays. The shutters are open, even though it's only been a week. "Poor Mr. Kim," … Read more
Andrea Danowski I was going to start off with the story my dad always tells about how he almost knocked over a Giacometti once. I don’t know if it was the one that recently sold for just over a hundred million dollars, but it was one of the Walking Man bronze sculptures. My dad lost … Read more
Shannon George Inside a small, oval-shaped wooden box festively adorned with yellow, green, and red paint lay six little dolls made of wire, paper, resin and tiny bits of cloth. Worry Dolls is how the store described them, and once I read the instructions for their use, they had to be mine. Before you go to … Read more
At nineteen years old, I become confused in my body and have to leave college. I walk in padded slippers and ratty bathrobe down the front hall of my childhood home. I avoid my mother and father, and my younger brother visiting from college who seems to be avoiding me, too. I work hard to … Read more
Robert Fox Mother’s Day 2011. I have finished my laundry, vacuumed the apartment and am mopping the floors. To keep up my cleaning mood, to do these domestic things I have learned over the years, I’ve got to have the radio blasting. Tom Schnabel has just started his Sunday show with The Intruders, “I’ll Always … Read more
I judge myself deeply, harshly – don’t allow courtesy given others, thoughtless tortured by tumultuous thoughts, ticking driving negativity nails through, aching begging, the merciless obsession eradicated, relentless screaming behind frozen stare, scared floods back like recoiling toes from cold water, endless forgiveness, permission – breathe and be, redemption when … Read more
I cannot muster effort enough to show what is and unspoken there what little deserves and overly qualifies a human to which I am particular. There is a body: made of sinews, contrasting with elasticity – his rubberband arms and legs cinnamon facades made for over-ambiguity – preserving a heart perpetual pumped this … Read more
1. Phenomenon Outcome spirals Through my circuitry, moving To thought, I am Pale, mouthing I do what I am told I am built for something I raise my eyes To whatever draws near, someone Touches me With my own hands 2. The … Read more
A buck ninety-nine. If you pull up to the Window at 32nd and Rose And order something cheap but good With a tad more fat than you know you should Have but secretly crave, Make sure to tell them to make it a value meal, And they’ll wrap her in whole wheat lace And stick … Read more
1 It was summer. I was sweeping in the kitchen, facing south. There was that milling around feeling, children everywhere, my own and some others — that white-haired child from down the road. Hear the sound of hammering, one, two, three, pause, one, two, three — a husband somewhere, working. There is no … Read more
When I was a kid my parents moved a lot, but I always found them. They would carry on as if changing the locks was a game all parents played with their oldest child, to trick them into resiliency. They let my little sister have my bedroom one day while I was at school, to … Read more
in remembrance of Eun Kang What if it were just called Monday, not Night of Remembrance, not Ceremony or Candlelight Vigil? If this night was a night with nothing to take back? If women did not carry tea lights or pray under a canopy of bamboo? What if there … Read more
“Do you have a boyfriend?” It was one of the first questions my students asked me when I stood in front of their class on the opening day of the school year. Thirty-some heads of dark hair, thirty-some dark eyes, thirty-some blue-and-white uniforms, thirty-some giggling girls. “It's okay,” I said, calming down their laughter. “No, no … Read more
I need a camera, to my eye, to my eye, reminding which lies I’ve been hiding -Wilco, “Kamera” There is profuse proof of my existence after age 10. My photographic life begins awkward, barely pre-teen. Band concerts, summer camping, middle-school portraits of me with braces, family pets, all chronologically ordered into albums; a … Read more
At the observation station observers tried observing themselves making observations and were impressed by the results. A film loop of a loop of film being filmed in a loop. For scientific purposes, some said. For posterity said others, to preserve in our selves the making of ourselves, as seen in the making. Doesn't everyone … Read more
How to still the gills until they need to go how to go from the … Read more
Shon didn’t have enough money. All his friends had forgotten him. He couldn’t pay his sex tax and that meant that he could no longer be a man. He’d be processed into a stone, and he knew he’d be deaf and blind dust. Each particle of the dust he would turn into would be listening … Read more
It's midnight and the only two people in the green house are watching Tarantino films, the blood on the screen screaming "Get down!" The house shakes its roof doubtfully because the couple should go to sleep instead of arguing about who's the best director, and is Tarantino cool or only a wannabe, and is the … Read more
Doth God exact day-labour, light denied. (John Milton, 1608-1674) Everyone recognized Dr. Nelson. A political science professor at Southern Illinois University, the man was a campus fixture, kind and gentlemanly, impeccably dressed. We marveled at the dignity and ease with which he and his guide dog navigated the hilly, wooded campus. He was exotic, intriguing, … Read more
