Deliberate

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...

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Your Father’s Body

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...

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The Space Between

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...

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The City That Never Freezes

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...

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An Unnatural History

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...

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The Mother Compact

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...

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Some Assembly Required

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...

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Severance

Alma García We are deep, at twenty-seven thousand feet and counting on the east side of the Great Ridge, and we have been ruptured. We are tearing apart. We will remain calm. This is not our first...

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Insecticide

Angela Yang 1. The man printed on the insecticide can wears oversized boots and taut muscles. He looks like he has seen all types of cruelty, grown disinterested, and so turned to benevolent killing....

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Art Gallery 2

Issue 51.1 Art Gallery II Collage 30 by Libby Saylor Mixed media on paper Collage 37 by Libby Saylor Mixed media on paper LIBBY SAYLOR has been making art since childhood. She received her BFA in...

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