by Jenny Boyar The United Skies of Purple Rain The rain itself will never be purple. Nor will the sky be – at least not in the moment when the world turns overcast, then darkens into downpour. Overcast days never turned me on. Purple’s emergence will be dependent on the rain’s end and even then, on the […]
Category: Creative Nonfiction
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Baby Blue
by Elizabeth Spano Baby Blue You hold the newborn baby, and you think, don’t drop the baby, don’t drop the baby. You fear you’ll temporarily lose your mind and drop the baby on purpose. You test your grip and reassure yourself that you are sane, that you are fully capable of supporting this baby in […]
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Strumming Some Hums
by Clint Martin Strumming Some Hums “But it isn’t Easy,” said Pooh to himself, as he looked at what had once been Owl’s House. “Because Poetry and Hums aren’t things which you get, they’re things which get you. And all you can do is to go where they can find you.” – A.A. Milne * Sitting […]
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Ladies Lazari
by Anna Swann-Pye Ladies Lazari Two months ago, I wrote an essay about the death of my dog and subsequent loss of a pregnancy. I compared forms of grief, thought about god and death, and sent it around to my loved ones and a couple literary magazines for good measure. The Board of Editors at […]
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Dark Feet, Dark Wings
by Laurie Clark Dark Feet, Dark Wings To go in the dark is to know the light To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight, And find that the dark, too, blooms and sings, And is traveled by dark feet and dark wings. —Wendell Berry There are no flowers or balloons in an Intensive […]
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Ghosting
by Michele Alouf Ghosting As a child, I sang Paul Simon’s “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover” with my mom and brothers as we drove home in her canary-yellow Cordoba from an afternoon of Christmas shopping at Sarasota Square Mall. Most likely, it was a balmy Florida day, early in December, around the mid-seventies (both […]
by Mags Kingston I Can’t Fall Asleep in the Bed I Grew Up In I step over the threshold into my childhood home, and I become an insomniac all over. I am grown now, but here, again, everything is the same: the same nighttime routine, the same shampoo, the same lilac walls, the same picture […]
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Phantom Pain
by Michael Chin Phantom Pain I thought autobiography might afford me immortality. Facile as it seems now, the idea felt profound. After all, each time I immersed myself in the scene of a good book, it felt as though that moment had a sort of life to it, reanimated if only in my imagination, remembered […]
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Arms Full
by Angela Townsend Arms Full To the naked eye, my mother did not appear to be a bodybuilder. Fellow patrons of Thrall Library saw a dancer in Reeboks with a passing resemblance to Audrey Hepburn. She jangled in the kind of rock-candy earrings an anthropologist might wear. But my mother was capable of carrying hardcovers […]
by Asya Graf Journal of Training and Competition 1. 50 Years Since Great October I’m on the floor of my parents’ living room, among piles of Soviet black and white photos that still smell like developer, and a notebook too thin for what it holds. A hummingbird’s whirr competes with the drone of a lawnmower. […]
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A Case for More Stuff
by Caroline Mahala A Case for More Stuff I watched my friend, and one of six co-signers for this little unit, try to angle his surfboard over the heap of duffel bags and laundry baskets. The unit was hardly bigger than a walk-in closet, but there was no ceiling, so the board had room to […]
by Whitney Schmidt Hope Is the Thing with Seeds Under my heart a vast apple tree grows wild—sprawling crook-limbed, teeming with green, tough and stout from trunk to twig. She fights for years to breach our back yard, splittingfence posts, rooting under the neat neighbor’s side to the havoc of ours, where grubby tangles of […]
by Kale Hensley When the Last Trumpet Sounds, I Will Be in the Mummy Room at the Museum after Maria Rossetti, who said the opposite, presumably as a joke As a pew-child, I kept my neck tilted up, up, up. Looking, waiting. That is how I saw that the shadows of chandeliers in a back-holler […]
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Patterns
by Michael Hanson Patterns I’ve had this image in my head where I’m standing in a well-lit room holding my cousin Patrick’s brain. Light fixtures flicker and the air smells like embalming solvents and I’m there alone holding Patrick’s brain, the edges of the room with that warped look you see in stainless steel, like […]
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Mysophobia
by Kelle Groom Mysophobia musos, uncleanness; phobos, fear I’d love to live above ground if possible. Fly to DC, take a cab to my sublet. I’m here for four months for a writing residency. Excited to see the apartment I’ve only seen in photos. Early evening when I arrive. Building squat and square, but massive. […]
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How to Cum in Spite of–
by Brionne Janae How to Cum in Spite of– “For finally this body is open. And thisbody it is mine.” excerpt Malcolm Tariq’s Fucking a Proclamation I once had a partner who made what I thought was the saddest face when she came. I didn’t understand it—and I suppose would have worried something was […]
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Lunch
by Sophia Khan Lunch 0. Tarry slivers of opium, sucked from beneath your nanny’s fingernails You have heard you were a horror: cried all night; failed to thrive. You want something ineffable. Nothing you are given ever satisfies. What is the poor woman to do? One evening when you are nine months old, you will […]
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A Word Flows Between Us
by Vimla Sriram A Word Flows Between Us When the word Heathen barrels past the street and lands at my feet, I already know its intended for me even if it hangs unclaimed suspended like molecules of mist before the averted eyes of the regulars at the transit center. * Among the more palatable meaning of Heathen […]
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The Sun is Down
by Randy Smith The Sun is Down The nandina’s briolette-cut leaves and conical white flowering spires paste their dreamy selves against the night in a spellbound collage. Collage meaning a jumbled collection of impressions, events, and styles, from French meaning “to glue.” Night is a pastiche of memory, even when it is the […]
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Of What May Come
by Jill McCabe Johnson The thud of a suitcase upstairs, sink faucet turned on and off, a muffled voice lilting in question. As I lie awake in our bed and breakfast, the sounds of life—of other’s lives—hold comfort. They inhabit sequestered rooms, where unmasked breath can warm the nooks and pockets. Their voices curve around […]
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What Gone Looks Like
by Leah Claire Kaminski Crazy Snail and Backseat Driver by Igor Kasev I eat my first mushrooms in traffic with my sister on Seven Mile Bridge. I’m a small notch in the metal spine of cars cooking over the hot sea. Over the old bridge running next to us like a mouth missing teeth, a […]
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The Art of Boiling Water
by Rose Strode Water is easy to drink. Too easy, considering it’s not easy to find. Once found, one must consider its source. Water’s powerful, shaping the landscape through which it flows, yet also vulnerable, retaining in itself particles of all the places it’s been. The first time I considered water, I was twenty-seven. The […]
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Thai Trojan
by Ploi Pirapokin During the summer, after my first year of graduate school, I borrowed my father’s Royal Bangkok Sports Club card to pay for two papaya shakes. My friend and I gulped them down as the waiter held the brown card up—eyes darting between the tiny headshot of my wrinkled father and my oops-expression—then […]
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At the Edge of Water
by Sayuri Ayers Behind my house, Alum Creek swells with the March rains. Parting the bare branches of overgrown pawpaws, I walk to the edge of the bank. A birch leans into the water, its stripped branches stark as bared bone. Below the steep drop, the creek swirls. Its current bears Columbus, Ohio’s debris: crumpled […]
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Here
by Nada Samih-Rotondo While CNN broadcast the Iraqi army’s invasion of Kuwait City to the world, I was trying to tune into my morning cartoons. That morning in August, I struggled to find a working station on our newly defective television for my cartoons. My mother received a long distance phone call from her younger […]
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The Magnificent Seven
by Vanessa Remmers Afterward, they ate gummy bears. They grabbed them from the bag, and pinched the spongy bodies. They did not eat them whole. Remember how we would not eat them whole? one says to another, twenty years later, over filet mignon at the Petroleum Club reunion dinner. Remember? How they ate them little […]
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Waiting
by Patrick Pawlowski “You write about your parents a lot.” –Helaina I have an idea for a fiction piece—everyone is disabled. Or maybe just everyone in America. Maybe they aren’t disabled; maybe it’s a weakened arm or leg. I imagine the hindering that disables them, a fog that slows in—it doesn’t kill anyone, unless they […]
Gulf Stream Magazine 