Kira K Homsher Two shirtless teenage boysPlay ball across the street.They dart in and out of my little square of vision,Casting long evening shadows downThe sidewalk. Oh, one of them has dropped The...
Hunt Hawkins The elevator opens on the 19th floorto a room full of hay, bleating sheep and goats,a loose rooster looking for grain.Through the windows we see the bright Palisadesand in the haze the...
Jeffrey Morgan There’s a barn owl that nests somewhere on our street. Reports differ. I’ve named her Ghost Face Junior and will correct people. Imagine her eyes dark marbles in the...
Michelle Matthees Like a barn door wide open: there was your O. Everything else was burned away, no hair, giant puckers inward like a flattened rubber flower. In front of the train station I passed...
Katie Bannon You find your father’s body by the kitchen sink. Hands clutching his heart, eyes shiny as marbles. Your mother’s scream cracks the quiet of the winter evening. Her mouth opens so...
Michael Hahn To little fanfare, in 2019, the Associated Press Stylebook abolished a hyphen. Stripped of the small dash, compound heritage terms such as Asian American and African American quietly...
Kim Drew Wright In my earliest memory with my two older sisters, I’m toddling around a South Carolina backyard, past a metal playset with one of those face-to-face swings you have to pull and push...
Heidi Schulz I start in the Meet the Family Gallery. There, behind glass, are wax figures posed in life-sized dioramas. My dad, smaller than I remember, is reading a Louis Lamour western in his...
Blair Hurley Mostly, missing her old life before the baby isn’t a conscious thing. She’s too tired to have a thought like that, with actual words and sentences. It’s more a fuzzy sense of...
Jared Green The box arrived during the period we would come to call Early Pandemic. We would speak of this time as though it were a distant geological era, a deep stratum, dense with meaning, in...