Hope Henderson 1. I keep your memories, or shadows of your memories. Memories once removed. I remember, for instance, the woman you loved before me, the one I never met: her hair blond and damp in...
Sam Paul My mother is screaming and crying on the phone. Her voice shakes with rage. “You’d be so pretty if you’d fix your teeth,” she stammers. “But you don’t care about being...
Abigail Ham 2023 Spring Nonfiction Contest Winner I Fight and flight are the typical human reactions to threat, but they’re not the only possibilities. Children in general can’t fight or...
Julie Marie Wade Maybe it starts here: bright swatch of color behind the closet door, yellow as a fisherman’s slicker. The swatter, they called it, and you thought about it even when you weren’t...
Brookes Moody While I might not have been in the exact emotional state of Lester Bangs, “nerves shredded and ghosts and spiders looming and squatting across the mind,” there was a time I too...
Robin Babb “Utopia is uninhabitable. As soon as we reach it, it ceases to be utopia. As evidence of this sad but ineluctable fact, may I point out that we in this room, here and now, are inhabiting...
Allison Field Bell My grandmother Ethel: I never met her. She died when my mother was twenty-one. Breast cancer that spread to the brain. She raised seven children. She was a naval officer in World...
Celia Cummiskey A young Roman woman walks along the bank of the river Tamesis. She is thinking perhaps of her parent’s home some hundreds of miles away from Londinium where she now lives, or of...
Linette Marie Allen Peering from the window of my train, I see not murder — fat and juicy murder, but wild collards growing woke, posh and unpicked, green as pistachio. I pop a few in horror —...
