by Judith Present
I was about eight; I think, when I walked passed my father’s office and saw him crying. For a child to see a parent cry is unnerving. True they are human beings, but children want to feel that their parents are stronger than they are and will always protect them. Walking into his office I saw him holding a photograph album.
Continue readingby Kirk Astroth
All day I’ve faced a barren waste
Without the taste of water,
Cool water
Old Dan and I with throats burned dry,
And souls that cry for water
Cool, clean water
–Marty Robbins, Cool Water
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by Jacob Anthony Moniz
We finish eating takeout at midnight. Stomachs churn with apprehension as we move closer to the end of this strange day, our first without you. We’ve brought weed and melatonin and essential oils from as far as the Sangre de Cristo Mountains to California. By the time we’ve found a spot away from the others, I feel dizzy;
Continue readingby Susan Land
Gabriel Miles fled from his classroom in the only fine-arts building of the only English-speaking college in Vienna, walked fast and then almost ran down the concrete steps and onto the cobblestones, past a shoe store and a bookstore and sex-toy shop and a plaque commemorating Mozart, and then 8 more blocks, and up the windy stairway to Branson’s door where Branson, who hated Gabriel to arrive early, ordered him to wait on the balcony: no Wilkommen Freund, in that ridiculous drawl of his. No air kiss.
Continue readingby Eileen McLellan
“Kyip! Kyip!”
Inside its cardboard box, the bird seems to sense that freedom is near. As a volunteer for the local wildlife rescue organization, I often transport sick, injured or orphaned birds to their hospital. On this September day, though, I’m to release this healed bird back to the wild. I expect it to be a journey of celebration.
Continue readingby Kendyl Kearly
We didn’t talk about how I lived in a trailer. You knew it, but we never said so.
That old aluminum Diet Coke can—cinder blocks instead of wheels, waist-high dogs knocking you flat every time you came over—loomed in plain sight up on the hill, above the pond that my daddy drove the mower into when we were little. Whole rusty thing under in five minutes with a retching gurgle, 3,000 bucks down with the bullheads and fertilizer runoff. My papaw really let him have it that day.
Continue readingby Jake Westpfahl
2008
During my senior year of college, a therapist will tell me I think too much and ask me to explain what it is like in my head, but right now, we are stuck in a traffic jam on a highway that winds around and over downtown.
Continue readingby Natascha Graham
On the 28th March 1941, Virginia Woolf drowned herself in the River Ouse. The following is an Ekphrastic poem inspired by the painting of her sister, Vanessa Bell, by fellow Bloomsbury Group member, Duncan Grant. This poem is a moment wherein Vanessa is writing to her sister, only a week or two after her death, where life continues to break back in, with all of its sharp edges.
Have you ever been to Merivale?
She writes. While
Angelica, (six), fist full of flowers, arranges them in a pattern similar to that of the painted tile of the hearth.
Continue readingby Margaret Buckhanon
He owed this to two women: his beloved wife Zelda and a hometown agoraphobic girl. A ghost, hideous she was, and, intelligent. A cultured world traveler from reading, she went everywhere from nowhere tuck safely in her room above the family café. Young Morse worked as a boy of sixteen, washing dishes, feeding white folks including the ones who roamed the balmy southern nights hunting for incorrigible blacks, specifically males, who did not know their place.
Continue readingby Ken O’Steen
I live in America now. Of that you’ll hear more. I grew up in a place without democracy. The only truths you knew for certain were those you confirmed with your own eyes, or else conveyed by those you trusted without a microscopic iota of doubt. And they were few.
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