Bahiyyih El-Shabbaz Winner, 2014 Creative Nonfiction Award APRIL It’s early April, and my tummy is still a valley. By the summer, it will be a bunny hill. By mid-fall, a mountain. It’s not so...
Sayantani Dasgupta Runner-Up, 2014 Creative Nonfiction Award I. When I was nine years old, I read Swiss Family Robinson, and it exploded my imagination. At that time, my family and I lived in a...
Anna B. Sutton The nurse is small, chubby and folded over the desk like laundry folded then forgotten. She’s wearing worn pink scrubs and frameless glasses under a bowl-cut of thinning brown curls....
Ray Shea paperHere is one thing I do know: I didn’t write down enough of this when it was happening, and now there is nobody I can ask. This is why I am trying to piece together, from the available...
Noelle Catharine Allen Personal History THE DANCER AND THE DEMIGODS by Leonard Geist Leonard Geist, our beloved friend and contributor to this magazine, passed away in his sleep this month. He was a...
Natalia Holtzman paperIt’s wartime in Yugoslavia and Haso is searching through a local village. He goes into one of the houses and finds an old lamp. Just as he wraps a hand around this lamp, a...
Gabriella R. Tallmadge In your last letter, you said you’re living at Kajaki Dam, where the Helmand River is a muscular sash. Mostly, you see sandbags in the windows and watch the thin shoulders of...
Gabriella R. Tallmadge Come some blood, some gristle. Let myself be unfurled, red tongue rolled out, wine-thick, a wave. Speak myself into existence. Open wide the cage inside me, survey my boning,...
dawn lonsinger Winner, 2014 Greg Grummer Poetry Award paperSay what you will about the car-choked streets, how no one can walk on the sidewalks because they are covered with cheap goods, but all I...
Steph Kilen Winner, 2014 Fiction Award Must be a little over a year now I’ve been in the basement. Just me and the Swede, or whatever he is, I’m just assuming. He doesn’t talk. He can hear, but...