Colin Pope The Excess Stages of Grief I’d pull up to the big intersection where Elm rams headlong into crosstown four-lane trafficand gape through the windshield. I was going somewhere I’d think, the radio afroth, boiling love down to salt and tallow.This must be depression, I’d sing, nodding, turning for the pet store where […]
Kevin Hyde Praxinoscope Biographical Speculation, Part One As he watched her dip and twirl on the parquet floor, the young man thought about how she had been shaped, how a million unremarkable events determined the face, the weight, the hair, and the height of the person he saw. She was, he thought, an unbelievable […]
Kara Vernor Mood He said he could kill me. He was the third man to say it. That made three of them: infants gumming my ribs, trying for a nipple I wouldn’t give them. I felt them all now under my bedsheet—those baby-sized older men, bald, with fingernail specks and excess skin. I pulled […]
Darci Schummer The Veil —for OCM As soon as I held the petite pewter urn, I knew I would open it. “He always held you in such high regard,” his mother said as she gave it to me. When I closed my hands around it, she wrapped her hands around mine. “You know, Marie, […]
Aiden Baker Oolong Eileen had been seeing the man who liked feet for a month now. She realized this while she prepped the tea: a full month. Time enough for the moon to fatten and thin. Time enough to admit what it was. She clicked on the gas. Tiny blue flames licked the kettle […]
Lauren W. Westerfield That Same Summer I. Trace the outline of these fields: alfalfa, lentil, wheat. Green like citrus. Green like lasers. Arm stretched out as far as it will stretch beyond the window of his Ford Escape. Your fingers graze the line of the horizon, where blueness yields into Palouse. Your fingers trace […]
Beth Gilstrap How to Tattoo a Disordered Woman Session One: The Lovers, The Dreamers, and MeArtist: ConanLocation: Inside left wrist Ignore what she tells you about the Muppets helping her survive childhood. Turn her slender wrist in your gloved hands while you remark on her good veins. Ask her thoughts on size while you […]
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Cheyenne Nimes Skylab & Feather: Reflections on Skylab Falling, and a Long-Dead Father. If a person falls freely, he won’t feel his own weight. —Einstein A house on a horseshoe-shaped drive, in the Valley Forge section of the Mainline, Pennsylvania, a tract house—à la 1950s Levittown—mod under jumbo ham radio antennas and the sag […]
Rhonda McDonnell Remembrance Stone babies—that’s how such remembered thingsare: they nestle, hibernating insideto wake yearly with kickings and stirrings of sorrows forgotten that still abidein my body. Limbs intertwining linkgrief upon grief unbirthed, embedded, sightunseen. Held so long, turned gray, not flushed pinkbut bloodless, this easily ignored blight returns. Again, I see His body […]
Collin Callahan The Backwash of the Dead for Matthew Schumacher Insects scritch in soybean stubble.On a lost betyou paw the detachedtwo door for gasoline canisters while I muffle the omnipresent stench of a cereal plantwith another stale cowboy killer. Cystic acnesandhills spew fire ants in the pale stadiumbetween our headlamps. We get highoff playing […]
