Mike ItayaTHE OREGON TRAIL 1884 Today I am eleven years born! We McClelland Family, Pa, Ma, Sis, and me (plus Joseph, our Mormon frontier scout), strike out from Independence, Missouri. The Oregon Trail is bright before us, our ox-pulled Conestoga…
Sara MaeBIOLUMINESCENCE The pregnancy scare skulks through bay grasses. It tips us over like cows & drains our peach liqueur. Flashlights under the bleachers illuminating grope & teen & tooth & wick, a stick rattling the jellyfish to yield shine.…
Melody WilsonSURVIVOR GUILT My sister slept in the laundry room, the door fastened by a cinch strap and a nail. She painted the cinderblock walls purple. Some nights tires would slide into the gravel drive and it was my job…
Gay DeganiA FEW NECESSARY HOUSEHOLD RULES FOR SYBIL Don’t talk. Don’t say a word. Keep your mouth shut. Unless he talks first. And if he talks first, listen carefully. Listen for his tone of voice, look up to see if…
Kimm Brockett StammenJUMPING OFF THE END OF THE WORLD Five years ago my niece and I stood at The End of the World, an infamous diving cliff near Kualanui Point just outside Kona, Hawaii. Far below us the ravenous Pacific…
Tom LaichasFLOUNDER i The fingertips know things. Their ridged whorls …. confess… the … whole.. body’s whereabouts. The fingernails know things too, and knew them even before the teeth. ii The left hand arrives like a visitant, held one arm’s length…
Kelly GrayTELL ME HOW TO BUILD AN AUDIENCE WHILE YOU MOVE YOUR ARMS AND LEGS LIKE SERPENTS & SCARVES IN THE DARK OF A CATTLE RANCH When I was a kid, I wanted to be famous. I don’t know what…
Danny Cooperflats hot sand and grainy glass yours is packed like clay me i grab some seashells and scrape to the bone doe deer’s ribs on hard cement honey fur still clean and pristine same wet pink thread of mine…
Anna Farro HendersonPACKING FOR AN OVERNIGHT AT THE STATE CAPITOL Minnesota State Capitol May 2018 the last weekend of the legislative session No one likes conflict, but with the smack of a fist I am a million particles of brilliant…
Nikolaj VolgushevMODERNA My shoulder hurt a lot after the second dose and the following morning I found a thorny vine had sprouted from beneath the Band-Aid. It clambered down my upper arm in an emerald coil. I drove back to…
Peter AmosNIGHTS WHEN I’M TIRED Mom fell asleep around Labor Day that year and the slumber was deep. Dad bagged the recycling, drove to school on weekdays, spread his papers across the living room floor in the afternoons, and asked…
Emily SteinbergMen O Pause For over a thousand years, menopause has been treated as an illness, something to be feared and fixed. Emily Steinberg’s Men O Pause visualizes the grim history of the treatment and attitudes towards menopausal women throughout…
Kathryn Silver-HajoTHOUSAND-WATT SMILE Sara nearly dropped the peeling tin box of Grandpa Teddy’s things when she pulled out the yellowed, cracked black and white of Grandma Bea sitting on the wheel hub of their ‘38 Chevy, chubby ankles crossed. Sara…
Tricia ParkTHE DISTANCE FROM HERE TO THERE The other evening, on my way home from a violin recital in Gangnam, I missed a step and fell in the Seoul subway station. I caught myself on my hand, twisting my wrist.…
Sara DavisTWO STUDENTS WALK INTO A BAR I can’t believe you haven’t heard this story. I feel like we tell it all the time! Maybe not in class, no, but grad school isn’t all lectures and bad coffee. We do…
J. M. ParkerAUTOPSY OR, THE HOUSE OF YOUTH (LIKE A RUSSIAN MOUNTAIN) I kept a hand-written note, on creased but still clean typing paper, wedged into the pages of a book Dear Sweetheart― You’ve got the tv program and today’s…
Sarah SchiffLAB RAT VENGEANCE In the neuroscience lab where I worked as an undergraduate intern, we were studying what makes mice experience the sensation of fullness. You can just imagine who’d want access to those findings—the know-how to regulate people’s…
Chelsey Clammer29 REASONS WHY THERE WILL BE NO REPLY You didn’t visit me for fifteen months. I know, pandemic and whatnot, and we live three states apart, but why isn’t your lover in your “circle”? When we did finally see…
James DiazBUILDING BOATS, WRITING POEMS When building boats, we try to craft something that will hold us aloft, a durable vessel that can bear and balance the weight, and hold out against the waves. Some boats are perhaps more beautiful…
Interview by Michael McCarthyA Conversation with Amy Koppelman, Author of A MOUTHFUL OF AIR (Two Dollar Radio) I spoke with Amy Koppelman as she was finishing making her first book, A Mouthful of Air, into a feature film. Though she…
Dear June, A few weeks ago my wife and I were watching Noah, our two-year-old grandson, at our house. He was playing with some pots and pans on the floor of our pantry room, totally absorbed. I stepped out of…
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…
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,”…