Sophie NunbergA CONSTELLATION OF ERRORS Honorable Mention of the 2024 Cleaver Emerging Artist Award I study the events of my birth like astrologers do stars in the sky. I’m already late when, two days before I finally do break my…
Rebecca EntelHOW TO DRINK ENOUGH WATER IN WARTIME You have finally logged out from your social media because it was making you physically ill. With less scrolling, you’re not getting more done. You feel bad news from journalists or emails…
Ariana KellyAT ELEVATION In mid-June after my sophomore year at Yale, I took a Greyhound bus from New Haven, Connecticut to Boise, Idaho for $59.00. The ride took three-and-a-half days, during which two people were kicked off in Ohio for…
Peter GrandboisSOMETIMES WE SPEAK TO OURSELVES in dead things other times we fit too many bodies into the meadow where the elk whistle and stamp it’s strange this book of burning leaves where snow sometimes settles inside like prayer other…
Darcy LohmillerA SUDDEN GUST OF WIND We step out of the truck into a bright October sun and a howling wind. In the field we have chosen to hunt, thick stalks of grass flatten and shudder against the gusts. Our…
Sofi GuvenPROXIMITY When I get home, I start to make bread. I open my window curtains wide and prepare the ingredients. Buckwheat flour, salt, sugar, and yeast stored in jars, scooped out with a ring of measuring cups. The windowsill…
Luke KoestersHOSPICE INTAKE I close my eyes and jump / off a stone pointed cliff. / I’m back to falling / into the gulch below La Quebrada. / I was high diving / only four months ago. / I open…
Hannah SmartTHE DETRIMENT OF DOUBT “Hello, I’d like to report a fire at the Gerry’s Pizza off West Ninth Street.” “Okay, and your name, sir?” “Gerry Parker.” “Could you describe the situation?” “I am seated in the restaurant parking lot…
Todd RobinsonEverywhere the World is Green and Dying 1 And shelterbelts of feeling, barn swallows flashing …
J. Bradley MinnickA MAN’S REACH SHOULD EXCEED HIS GRASP My mother arranged for us to walk to school together. I didn’t want to go to school; and, I especially didn’t want to walk anywhere with Kate Wheeler. Kate Wheeler was…
Richie ZaborowskeSTAY ON THE LINE A tornado of nurses blew in. The whole maternity care team. Cracking commands. Swirling around. Wheeling your wife away. And when you stood to follow, they told you, no. To wait, and not worry. So…
Michelle BittingManger, Emptied I saw the shepherds slogging through red dust,Their sandals kicked up a ruddy cataclysmWith palm trees sighing through green stars above. This was in Los Angeles where the active sitefeatured a bereft crèche, no babe front and…
Joshua AmbreFREEDOM TRAIL In front of the visitor center, our tour guide adjusts his breeches. They’re slightly too tight to be family-friendly, but I’m relieved to have something to look at besides old buildings for the next hour. I watch…
Marie ManillaRETROSPECTIVE Lena skids around the backseat as the cabbie rudely shifts lanes. Her gnarled knuckles couldn’t negotiate the seatbelt. The tunnel engulfs her, the hum and grrr. The weight of all that earth compressing her brain. But they emerge…
Gideon Huan-LangTRANSNESS AS PERPETUAL PAPERBOY Imagine: Victorian hand-me-downs, black suspenders, tweed-lined cap. And he is holleringabout the end of the world. Extra! Extra! Read all about it. Call him doomsday cult, the way he had broken his voice already—the Titanic,…