Chika Onyenezi The Time Traveler 2016 Whatever I did, my pain stuck around. I wanted to sleep, pretend everything was solvable by just closing my eyes, and hopefully when I woke, I would see things clearer. But I couldn’t sleep. I sat up, grabbed a glass of wine that I left on the […]
Category: Winter 2017
“Cross” – JD Scott
JD Scott Cross It’s Tuesday. Into the gym I go—strength-building, weight-training, core-defining. It is not the type of body that generally gym-goes, but I go, and I go gorgeous. I go to a potluck after. I am swole and famished; I carb-fill. Pizza with olives on top. Cheese-coated breadsticks dipped in liquid garlic. […]
“Chop Shop” – Jessica Walker
Jessica Walker Chop Shop Nate had been brain dead thirty-three days when Roxy cut off the tip of her middle finger. The knife slipped from the flesh of the lime, tore off her nail and sliced the finger just short of the bone. She put the severed piece into a shot glass, stuck […]
“A Season For Burning” – Ramona Reeves
Ramona Reeves A Season for Burning Mobile, Alabama, 1969 I leap and leap trying to land in Daddy’s footsteps. Grandma Ames squeezes my left hand with her right and tugs me behind Daddy and Aunt Terri. “This is no time to fool around,” she says, so I walk serious-like and soon we are standing in […]
“What It Is to Preserve” – Amber Taliancich Allen
Amber Taliancich Allen What It Is to Preserve I once locked you in a closet. I never told you I was sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. The body is only thirty-three. The body is found and then the body is taken. I was never sure I wanted to […]
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“Passageways” – Sarah Andrew
Sarah Andrew Passageways This is the thing about living next door to a zoo: sometimes a peacock escapes into your yard and nibbles at your junipers, and you have to chase it around with a laundry basket until David the hunky zookeeper swoops in to retrieve it. You watch him tuck the bird […]
“Lessons in Laughter” – Tammie Rice
Tammie Rice Lessons In Laughter My son learned about spitballs on the morning of April 27, 1996, around 9:30 a.m. It was a clear spring morning and the chill in the air promised to give way by noon. My father spent his time that morning in a booth at Waffle House, explaining to […]
“The Cheek, the Jaw, the Eye, the Lip” – Terrance Wedin
Terrance Wedin The Cheek, the Jaw, the Eye, the Lip The throb of my mother’s sewing machine. Her foot depressing the pedal as the pool of fabric on the floor next to me disappears, fed carefully through the needle. […]
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“Cheval de Frise” – Dorsey Craft
Dorsey Craft Cheval de Frise Miles Brewton House, Charleston SC These soft-spoken spikes, a century dull,baked black in sun of this peninsula,remember themselves body-ready, sharpto burst between thin bones of a palm, slickto red with the rich energy of veins.Forged to cage wilted azalea, paint crackedover wood, wrought to be the inky ribsto […]
“Homunculi” – Lyrik Courtney
Lyrik Courtney Homunculi and what of the men living ruinous and discardedcadavering their gaunt bodies […]
