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Alone on the Winter Lake
By Kate Freeborn
I crunch along the northern Minnesota shoreline, make my body an animal in the wild. Big, knowing. Beneath me, White Iron Lake a frozen body of water. New snow pulls lake and shore into a contiguous landscape of winter. The afternoon sun illuminates it like a disco ball. Rock ledges erupt in white sunbursts and diamonds, the light rolling me forward. I lean into the wind and trek toward the empty center of the lake. Whipping snow zigzags across the whited plane and I race the snow snakes, my lungs exploding white plumes into the bright, egg-blue sky. Stopping, I drag my metal snowshoes in a full circle to face north. 2,500 miles of winter stretch to the apogee of the planet, the Arctic Circle.
I feel, for a moment, absolutely myself. The center of my own circle.
I don’t know it, but later I will be transported to that concentric ground again and again, perched on a rounded edge of wintry Earth. When I nurse my newborn in the folds of night, when I spoon honey into my child’s mouth to still her cough, when I park in the rooftop lot of a downtown ramp, when I rush to the office as the snow twists over the icy pavement. Then the woman on the lake will return to me, her snowshoes and eyelash crystals. Her heaving lungs. Alone in the wild winter and facing it down like an animal, she carries me with her into the blinding light.
Kate Freeborn received her MFA from the University of Minnesota. She lives with her husband, two daughters, and golden retriever in St. Paul, Minnesota. She is the recipient of a Minnesota State Arts Board Grant, the Loft Mentorship Series Fellowship, and the Gesell Award for Excellence in Creative Nonfiction.
Image by Adam Chang courtesy of Unsplash
Beautiful Things Archives
Things Not Always Seen
By Bex Hoffer
The bonfire is blazing when I arrive. Later, back home, I will relish the woodsmoke lingering on my skin, my clothes. Sweet balm of October...
Late February
By Sarah Hare
The snow is blinding, fluorescent white. Olive, not quite four, squints to watch a middle schooler descend the hill, staring like he’s in the circus...
November Geese
By Kit Carlson
You could hear them calling, cries reverberating between black November treetops and low-hanging pewter clouds. Reedy honks, voices from the far north, warning of winter.
Peel, Pith, and All
By Edith-Nicole Cameron
It was citrus season, which meant something once, when citrus had a season (December through March), came from a place (thirty degrees north of the equator), defined a culture (Orange County livin' was sweet and easy, Dad would say)...
Autobiography on the Eve of My Thirtieth Birthday
By Melanie Ritzenthaler
I think about God a lot because I think all ex-Catholics do. That means I think a lot about sin, and also about death...
Knot Theory
By Elaine Edwards
Below deck, musty with summer, a woman in a wilted white bonnet guides my hands through the motions: loop, cross, pull...
Rearview
By Ainsley McWha
One year post escape from the city—with its sharp, steely edges and shadowy tunnels; the collective vibrations, unwelcome grazes, and peering eyes of eight million urgent, shouting strangers—all I do these days is notice: clouds; birdsong; three droplets of morning dew along a blade of grass...
Marriage, Death Row
By Jodie English
The line goes dead two minutes into the month’s only phone call, his face flat against concrete, ankles raw from shackle sores, his hand cuffed to a metal plate high on the wall, fingers swollen, saying hello, hello as if she could hear him, as if the struck match of her voice was still there...
Mother Prayer
By Sanobar Sabah
Passionate red and sensuous saffron were my mother’s favorite colors. Inspired by the Bollywood queen of yesteryear, Rekha, my mother’s wardrobe was laden with glamorous chiffon sarees and handmade embroidered blouses from all over India...
A Child’s Work
By Carol Moody
She’s elbow-deep inside the dryer, searching for that old Halloween costume—as though everything depends on wearing a frayed polyester police officer jacket. Her parents have separated for good, and the three-year-old little brother wants to play “hopspital”—announcing himself as “Dr. Butter"...
On Our Way
By Paulette Studley
My mother thinks people are breaking into her house. Leprechauns. She tells me they’ve stolen her eyeglasses and supermarket receipts. At eighty years old, she sits beside me as I dole out antipsychotics to her pillbox and remind her that it’s not true...
We Call Up Danger Only to Send It Away
By Lindsey Pharr
“I can call ‘em, you know.”
“Call who?”
“The gators.”
“Bullshit.”
Trout Lilies
By Ginny MacDonald
I want to let Allie know that the autumn leaves were beautiful when she left, and now the trees are budding out in every green. The days are long again, and I showed her kids where the wild strawberries bloom. The growing is so quick and condensed up here...
Playing Hooky
By Candace Angelica Walsh
Dad sat at the park picnic table smoking one Marlboro after another, with not a word of protest from my sister or me — poles apart from the week before when we snapped his whole pack in half and flushed it down the toilet.
The Manicurist
By Helen Collins Sitler
My brother, nearly seventy years old, sits at his kitchen table. A sharp tang bursts from the bottle of nail polish he has opened. His wife, barefoot, sits facing him...
The Near Side
By Ghazala Datoo O'Keefe
Our days begin early. The sky is dark, stars hiding behind the wispy grey clouds...
Against Extinction
By Eve Maisey
Inside, my mother lives in a tornado of moods. She is the garden, shining like a rainbow of colors that dance beneath the sun. And then she is the mud, sulking into the shadow crevices of her blackened bedroom...
Moon-Belly
By Hanna Saltzman
When my toddler looks for the moon he squirms in my grip, arcs his body toward the cold dark sky. It’s our routine as we walk home from daycare, he the last child there, hospital pager clipped to my pants...
After the House is Finished
By James Geary
In the midst of the move, standing in my study among shoulder-high stacks of book boxes, I had that feeling you get after committing to a dramatic course of action that is, you now suddenly realize, too late to reverse: My God, what have I done?!...
JoAnn, Showing Photographs in Her Studio
By Casey Loken
She tucks her hair behind her ears and removes the first clean sheet. We lean in to see the photo formerly concealed. Strong winter light pours through the tall windows and illuminates the image–bougainvillea in shades of gray tumbling down a mottled stucco wall.
I Hold Back His Hair
By Rebecca Ingalls
He’s eleven. The headaches started when he was five. They stab, go away, return in fury. Sometimes they build, a stampede of wildebeests charging through his left eye.
Enough
By Miriam Mandel Levi
My father does not hug or kiss me, has never said he loves me, or that he’s proud I’m his. He gives me money. “Here, this’ll help with those roof repairs,” but looks bored when I tell him anything. At the end of a phone conversation, he’ll say, “Well, that was productive,” if it was...
The Monkeys Don’t Care
By Lisa VanderVeen
Dusk at Kathmandu’s Pashupatinath Temple is monkeys. Settling into the November chill, succumbing to the dark vignette of the horizon, this time is theirs...
Personal Items
By Robin Lanehurst
On the day my mother died, it was raining, the kind of corded sheets of rain that soak you through before you
even realize you're wet. The long hallway of the ICU had a wall of windows with drab hospital chairs on one
side and door after door on the other—all closed...
What Remains
By Nancy Huggett
Sarah, the chair of the church council, walks the poinsettia over to my house under the full winter moon. I can see her standing haloed under the porch light, with the tiny tender plant held lovingly in her mittened hands.
Visitations
By Austin Hagwood
One morning a single hummingbird, iridescent green, tapped its sword-like beak against the windows of a Forest Service lookout tower 8,000 feet above sea level.
One More Stone
By Robin Schauffler
Once a jagged, broken chunk of black basalt, then polished for decades or centuries by sand and wind and sea.
Lessons From Dog School
By Virginia Boudreau
My fingers stayed tangled in our terrier’s silvery fur. His breath calmed, hitched once, then stopped. I cradled his still-warm body.
Little Packages
By Jennifer Robinson
Today the checkout clerk at Safeway folded my newspaper into three vertical sections, then opened a sliver of pages at one corner and tucked the other corner neatly in, making the whole thing into a trim and sturdy little rectangle.
A lot of Tomorrows
By Lavinia Spalding
We are at the dinner table when my young son asks, “The day after a lot of tomorrows, will we build a treehouse?”
Tiring the Ghosts
By Ella Mei Yon Harris
My Chinese family revered our ghosts. We made altars, gave offerings, and publicly denounced accomplishments, inherited or earned, to make sure the ghosts passed us by.
Every Creature Deserves This
By Rebecca Suzuki
The sun is slow to rise, and my mother says it’s because it’s cold and “the sun too, wants to stay warm under a blanket.”
Labor Day
By Kathryn Ganfield
Labor Day is made for a garden, for a field. In childhood, it was made at Mr. Wright’s, his garden expanding my notion of what one could be, where the rows of tomatoes and peppers and trip-hazard zucchinis vined to the horizon, where a baby blue water tower cast the only cooling shade. On Labor Day, we were Mr. Wright’s pickers, us five kids tumbling from our diesel station wagon with our summer scabby knees, suntans, and streaks of blond.
Dinner Date
By Jillian McKelvey
We sit on the cement porch, our legs folded over the top step eating seafood in the dark, like lovers.
Bánh Mì for Beginners
By Jeanette Tran
Get the Ham, Head Cheese, and Pâté, a.k.a. Special Cold Cut Combination, or Ðặc Biệt for short. Chicken is fine for the less adventurous, but only old people order shredded pork floss or sardines.
Watercolor Meadow
By Michelle Webster-Hein
At age 70, my mother has taken up watercolor painting. In our family chat, she uploads photographs of her progress—birch trees, beachscapes, stems of lavender. For my birthday, I requested a scene of a wildflower field, so she framed it and gifted it to me, brushing off my compliments with her usual deflections.
Inflatable Christmas Yoda
By Annie Barker
I discover him on my morning walk, in the yard of a brick Tudor home in my neighborhood, anchored to the dry brown lawn by wires and stakes, but nonetheless tipping forward at the waist, somewhere between mid-fall and flat-on-his-face. A full month into the new year, he still holds out a present—blue bow on blue paper—and he is smiling. Here, I have this present for you.
A Seasoned Skillet
By Jennifer Gallo Gaites
Searching for a recipe—old school, pulling cookbooks from the shelf and scanning glossy photographs—a yellowed advice column slips to the floor. “Hints from Heloise.” I bend down, and carefully slide my nails beneath the stiff newsprint. “A Seasoned Skillet.”
The Coloring Book
By Joel Savishinsky
He had red hair, almost white in certain slants of light. It was his first time on the ward. Barely three years into his life, the stuffed creatures were larger than he was, and he liked hiding among them. He loved his coloring book, and with his crayons he re-made creation to fit his palette: a smiling blue lion, a grinning green giraffe, a playful purple monkey. The hues each found a home in the peaceable kingdom of his mind...
Day One, or Maybe Two
By Kim Chinquee
There are people stuck in cars. There’s a driving ban, save essential workers. The essential workers are getting stuck and the rescue teams trying to rescue the essential workers are getting stuck, snowplows are getting stuck trying to rescue the rescue teams, and finally the city gives up. Three people have already been confirmed dead...
Playing Hooky
By Candace Angelica Walsh
Dad sat at the park picnic table smoking one Marlboro after another, with not a word of protest from my sister or me — poles apart from the week before when we snapped his whole pack in half and flushed it down the toilet. We were extending some grace in exchange for the freedom of a Tuesday outing during the school year, not yet knowing...
Homage to the Jewish Morning Prayer Giving Thanks for the Wonders of the Body, Its Vessels and Arteries, Openings and Closings
By Naomi Cohn
After getting held up in the Y parking lot all those years ago, after the weirdness of seeing the dark circle within the approaching gun muzzle, after feeling the metal on my cheekbone, the exact spot I’d bumped with the phone receiver earlier that day, after the adrenalin rush...
Honey (I Put Down My Ax)
By Rasma Haidri
The first one said honey was what Vietnamese hookers called from doorways, so don’t call him that. The next one said honey was a substance to spread on bread, so why did I call him that. Store clerks in the South called all of us honey. Teachers, too, even when paddling our behinds. Oh honey...
On Massachusetts General Hospital Reaching Out to Schedule Your COVID-19 Vaccine
By Sarah Kilch Gaffney
Even nearly a decade on, they couldn’t have known that your cognitive decline and general dislike of communications necessitated all emails come to me.
Jumping in Leaves
By Joseph Gross
He runs laps around the yard that culminate in a cannonball or a backflop or a headfirst dive. He has shed his gloves, coat, hat, despite the forty-degree temps. I think of my own jumping age, the familiar mold and fruity cedar smell down in the pile, the desire to be buried completely.
Ceremony
By Jill Talbot
This is our end-of-the-day walk with our dog. A few nights ago, she picked two of the tulips—red-pink petals, black anthers—and put them in a mason jar on my nightstand. Tonight, she asks if she can pick one for herself. And because they're on an island not attached to any home, I say sure...
The Beckoning Rose
By Alvin Johnson
Several years ago, my wife and I drove from Charlotte to Pinewood, South Carolina, hopeful we might find the gravesite of my Johnson ancestors. This was the town where my ancestors were slaves on plantations owned by the Richardson and Manning families, who produced five governors of South Carolina...
Skywriting
By Sabrina Hicks
One evening, when my kids were little and demanding, and my sense of self felt like a slow leak, replaced with the repetition and duty of young motherhood, I took refuge in my backyard. I was alone, feeling a thousand miles away from the desert and mountains of my childhood, uprooted and placed in a New York suburb near a hidden coastline.
The Cheese Case
By Katie Machen
Sundays give the impression of time. There’s patience, even as a line forms to the back of the shop, everyone coming in all at once for their week’s salami and ham.
Old Horse
By Rebecca Reynolds Weil
Along the edges of bramble rose and burdocks, he flushed wild turkeys into flight in front of him, like a ship scattering schools of fish before its bow. Gleams of deer, wide-eyed beneath the apple tree, would freeze in place—hocks cocked to run, green apples paused in their mouths—cupping our sound in their ears as we clattered by, all hooves and thunder over the ground...
On the 20th Anniversary of 9/11
By Laura Joyce-Hubbard
I think of John Ogonowski, leaving his farm at dawn in his green Chevy pickup. John flew cargo planes in Vietnam, knew the Boeing 767 like creases in his palm...
The Aquarium
By Michele Rappoport
The glass is splotched from her many attempts to escape, but she is not frantic now. She floats in the small space like a seahorse in deep ocean...
After a storm, a quiet dinner
By Liv Kane
I watch a little part of my mother heal, stitched together with each slow blink shared between them; she is a girl left behind, feeding a man who never fed her. His jaw broken from a one-sided fistfight, from sleeping on the street, his graying tongue and beating heart flashing wildly each time he chews...
Chicken Fingers
By Kelly Shetron
“Everything is copacetic!” Memom would say whenever I called. I imagined her feeling her way around her small apartment, keeping up with her rituals: drinking instant coffee in the pre-dawn morning, singing aloud to Sinatra, organizing her closet...
Mother’s Day
By Ann Kaye
After we’ve been watered, she pulls me toward the garden filled with descendants of my mother’s divided hostas and lilies. I press my ear against a tiger lily, name it, and ask if she hears it roar. She listens, eyes wide, and says no...
The Bird
By Diane LeBlanc
I don’t know the student leaning into my office with this question. But I’ve just finished active shooter training, a mental health webinar, and several pandemic-response seminars, so I assume the worst. I follow her down the hall as she explains. A bird is swooping around their classroom. It might hurt itself...
Back in the Same Day
By Rebecca Turkewitz
This is my dad’s particular gift: to find wonder and surprise in the daily act of living. "You really just made that?" he says with delighted skepticism when I bring a platter of French toast to the table. "Oh, wow! You’re GOOD!" he exclaims after my mom remembers where the birthday candles are kept...
Cool Mom
By Heidi Fettig Parton
When the Pixies’ song, “Where is My Mind?” comes on the radio, I turn it up.
My backseat passengers usually spend the drive home in a sort of side-by-side engagement with their phones, occasionally sharing mutual laughter at things I cannot see...But on this day of spring weather, the boys go eerily quiet, and I wonder if this 1997 song translates perfectly into 2022...
Welcome to Iowa
By Robin Hemley
“Wow. Well, welcome to Iowa.”
“I live here,” I said.
“Oh, how long were you in Japan?”
“Three days, but before that I was in Singapore for a year.”
“Singapore,” he said. “I’ve never been out of the country. Well, Canada. At least here, we got toilet seats with covers.”
Lydia Walked
By Sarah Beth Childers
At sixteen-and-a-half months old, my daughter was committed to speed crawling across the drought-dirt lawn, to strolling the summer sidewalk while clutching a large, firm hand. An early crawler, she’d scuffed out the knees of every zip-up sleeper and pair of baby jeans she’d worn since she was five months old...
Reckless Memory
By Anna Leahy
That night I drove in the dark with you across the lawn, we were each leaving in our own way and had been drinking for tomorrow, and after I didn’t hit the college security guard on his bicycle, thank god, I let you take the wheel and also the rap because, even though it was my car, you were driving when the siren stopped us.
Ways of Seeing
By Melanie Bryant
I hope she finds lucky pennies and treasures, but she tells me there are only weeds and cracks in the concrete. I want my mother to unbend herself. I want her to see how the clouds break in the evening sky, the cascade of purple wisteria that falls from the rooftop, the fullness of the moon...
The Mansion Game
By Caitlin Horrocks
As we drive, the houses swell until they are mansions with sweeping green lawns. Of course my four-year-old notices. His noticing becomes a competition: every house he deems nicer than ours...
Trout Lilies
By Ginny MacDonald
I want to let Allie know that the autumn leaves were beautiful when she left, and now the trees are budding out in every green. The days are long again, and I showed her kids where the wild strawberries bloom. The growing is so quick and condensed up here...
For My Students
By Robert Barham
From Alabama, Tennessee, and Michigan, China, Austria, and Indonesia, they see the world’s grandeur and glory, menace and ruin. They are Nabokovs, Morrisons, O’Connors, Didions. They want answers, want to know what matters, would rather be somewhere else...
Shadow in the Wrack
By Jodi Paloni
The morning I found a loon curled in seaweed, breast picked clean, bones laced with foam from the outgoing tide, I had just been thinking how content I’ve been living and walking this brief bit of Maine coastline, black and gold sand glitter shifting in the shallows.
Breadcrumbs
By Angela Sucich
After repairing her ruptured aneurysm, her doctors still worry about blood-on-the-brain; the risk of stroke. Funny how that word can refer to both a deadly blow, and my hand caressing her hand.
We Call Up Danger Only to Send It Away
By Lindsey Pharr
“I can call ‘em, you know.”
“Call who?”
“The gators.”
“Bullshit.”
Sweet Remedy
By Jeniah Johnson
Her nighty glowed in the dim light as she filled the kettle from the tap. Long fingers tweezed in a mason jar of golden buds picked from the scars of stones.
No Longer Strangers
By Peter Welch
I ask her how she is holding up. If she is safe. "Yes, I am safe, and out of Ukraine," she quietly offers.
Accord
By Vandana Khanna
My mother wanted order wherever there was wildness. It was the same with words. She’d make me break them up into two and three syllables, manageable units that she insisted I repeat. The sound of them in my mouth like some kind of ancient prayer, my tongue shaping them against my teeth until ambition slid easily into atonement like I’d been saying these words forever.
Paper Boats
By Sara Martin
The pastor talks of frankincense and myrrh, but Jeff and I are fixed on Grandpa’s hands as he creases and folds one of the papers until he peels the sides apart into a small boat.
The Green Apple God
By Tom Fate
The image just didn’t make sense. The rainbow of warm colors was gone, replaced by a ball of eerie green light. Where did that come from?
Gestures
By Jody Keinser
We sit on her bed, legs touching, and I read I’ve Loved You Since Forever, her choice, a story about adoption. After she came home with us three years ago, I searched the internet for books about adoption and with protagonists who are Hispanic, like her birth father’s family.
Death, Grief, and Honey Nut Cheerios
By Kiely Todd Roska
Emmalani prefers life without clothing. Today she sports purple butterfly underwear. Nothing else. Her brown bangs fall over her eyes, finally regrowing after her latest full-headed self-haircut.
Ode to a Buddhahead Dad
By Edward Iwata
Dad and his pals call themselves buddhaheads---street slang for Japanese Americans. He believes in Uncle Sam---until his immigrant parents lose their livelihood and Los Angeles farm during World War II.
Into the Mist
By Ken Martin
...Those were the early days. I would later learn the best tools for helping Dad were not confrontation or argument, but simply calm and understanding, always approaching him with a smile and an attitude of acceptance.
I Feel As One in Sex But Also
By Heather Lanier
My husband’s hand slips beneath the back of my waistband...A year before forever, another boy did the same. I was twenty-one. My dorm light was as dim as my knowledge of bodies.
Honey (I Put Down My Ax)
By Rasma Haidri
Store clerks in the South called all of us honey. Teachers, too, even when paddling our behinds. Oh honey, I hate to have to! Honey is why I’m supposed to be careful with how much heather I hack to clear the cliffside path where I want to walk with bad knees...
Snow Day
By Rick Joines
At least an inch, with an underlayer of ice, a glaze of tiny beads, encrusted light. Strange and rare here, so everyone stays home. No school. A few cars creep by, spin sideways into the intersection. The kettle dings. Coffee burbles in the filter, steams in its pot. Across the street, the little girl and her brother, only a bit older, step out. Side by side, for balance. They bend to touch frozen blades of grass, leaves, pine cones, needles, the peach tree’s bare stems.
Bathroom Pass
By Mazzer D'Orazio
A freshman appears in my doorway, late for class again, extending an orange traffic cone. She proclaims: “I found it in a ditch!”
This is the blessed randomness of a high school creative writing class. The students’ hair colors are a rotating gradient of pinks, purples, and blues. At any given moment we could make a rainbow. When thirty percent of your face is covered, your hair color matters thirty percent more.
On Massachusetts General Hospital Reaching Out to Schedule Your COVID-19 Vaccine
By Sarah Kinch Gaffney
Even nearly a decade on, they couldn’t have known that your cognitive decline and general dislike of communications necessitated all emails come to me. They couldn’t have known about the radiation oncologist there who spent hours with us, but never spoke to you, or that the proton beam radiation she ordered, galactic and mysterious still, was meant to save your life, but instead prompted a cascade of complications you would never recover from.
Sprouts
By Kaci Stiles Laws
A woman scrunches up her nose. I follow her gaze to my five-year-old son, oblivious to her, picking out his favorite Zevia. He grabs a root beer; she sneers, makes a sideways comment, her husband laughs, and I catch his eye. I brush it off and smile because I have a choice. My first option is to let my insecurity tell me a story about the couple at the store: It's my son's hair. It’s his clothes. It’s the ringworm on his cheek he got from our kitten. It’s about us. Something mean.
COVID Subnivean
By Adrie Kusserow
Northeast Kingdom, Vermont
Ground frozen, mice and voles on lockdown below, still they skitter beneath, not even the fox dares to dive into the snow taut with a glassy sheath of ice. The Barred owls, too, are starving, crouched near birdfeeders in broad daylight. This morning, I spot a huge one huddled in the gangly clutch of our plum tree, tucked deep into its speckled feathers. I tiptoe up. No matter how close, it doesn’t budge, watching me, but lapsing into sleep, grunting as it dozes off in a dopey hunger trance.
Moon Walk
By Libby Brydolf
We make it to the brushy meadow before we get our first glimpse of the moon: a slip of glow rising. We watch in the cool spring evening until it hangs whole over Kwaay Paay Peak before continuing on the wide dusty track.
Two teachers, a dozen wild-eyed preschoolers and their parents, we are on a full moon hike, no flashlight in sight. We chat as we wander down a slight slope toward a grove of old oaks and watch shadows deepen in the rising blue light.
Backward Steps
By Gary Fincke
In our kitchen, some nights, my wife walks backwards, but mostly she does her retreats in the living room, where there is room for additional steps. She says this exercise postpones the arrival of unsteadiness, mustering a smile when she manages back and back again with grace. Mobility is vital now that we are in our mid-seventies. A friend’s hip-breaking fall is already stored on our anxiety’s flash-drive.
Lenore
By Monica Judge
I never witnessed Grandma Judge in the act of creation. On her visits, she presented crocheted doilies and Kleenex box covers, butterflies stitched in monarch colors affixed to magnets. My sister and I snuggled under the blanket she’d hooked together, dozens of brown circles edged in orange and yellow. We hung her angels, fluttering in white yarn, on our fir.
Last Night in Billings, Montana
By Sheree Winslow
Your mom, dad, and sister left for California first, explorers in search of housing after Dad got a job in Los Angeles. When they returned to pack and fetch you, they talked fast, words buoyant, while describing an event at Paramount Studios, then another in Beverly Hills to celebrate the anniversary of the Apollo moon landing. Tom Hanks was there. Mom had a new CD, music acquired after hearing it on smooth jazz radio, a variety of station not available on Billings FM. From the house they rented, they could hear the crowds attending World Cup games at the Rose Bowl, celebrating winner Brazil. But the skies were barren at night, no stars.
Parting Smile
By Brad Snyder
Dan has lost weight along with most of the feeling on his left side. His wife, Amanda, holds a four-pronged cane. The two of them perform a slow maneuver to get him into his wheelchair in preparation for our lunch. I’m seeing my friend for the first time since his diagnosis, brain cancer at 43, during this visit that the vaccines made possible.
“Are you in pain?” I ask.
A tear runs down Dan’s cheek. I want the question back.
Heart Height
By Melissa Bowers
After practice, she pulls down her unicorn pictures and the hand-lettered painting that reads My love, only you know what my heart sounds like from the inside. Replaces them with creased softball posters. I’m sorry, she tells me, I’m not sure if I believe in unicorns anymore.
Atmospheric River
By Anita Lo
When I was a child I frequently imagined ways in which I might perish in a natural disaster. I remember one night waking my father to ask whether it was more likely that a volcano, a tornado, or a flood would destroy our house.
Il Nocciolo De Pesca
By Anna Farro Henderson
We cut the peaches, cook them down and pour the meat and juice into glass jars. We collect the seeds in another jar. “Why do you collect the seeds?” I ask. I am working on a farm in Alba, Italy. In exchange for my labor, I eat meals with the family and sleep in a small trailer by the chicken coop.
The Silver Horse
By Rose Strode
I found a silver coin in my mother’s fancy things drawer when I was six: a large coin, inscribed with inscrutable writing, nestled among thigh-high nylons and diaphanous shortie nighties. On one side was the harp of royal Ireland; on the other, a horse.
The horse wore no saddle, but stood braced, head high, ears pricked as if listening to someone outside the silver circle of its world. A hole was drilled through the top. Ma left rural Ireland in 1960 when she was nineteen, married in Boston at twenty-five. Her parents couldn’t afford to attend her wedding, but sent this coin, which Ma wore under her dress.
Still Life
By Elizabeth Koster
“Isn’t this magnificent?” my mother says, sweeping her arm across the sky’s reflection in a pond of water lilies in Giverny. To think, we were in the very garden that Monet had painted....
Magnolia
By Emily Lowe
On the day we move to Mount Airy, we stand in the front lawn of our new home next to a large magnolia tree in full bloom. Already, we are less than three years away from my father’s stroke, just feet from where he will fall. As we move our bags into the house and unload the small bits of our lives that fit in the trunk, we walk past the magnolia again and again, not realizing it is where my father...
Patches
By Jennifer McGaha
In April of 1979, my mother, father, and I lounge on a jon boat on Lake Keowee in South Carolina. In the stern, my dad props his fishing rod against the motor handle, then pulls off his hat, wipes sweat from his bare head. In the bow, my mother guards the cooler. If you want something to eat, you have to run it by her....
A Cup Cracks
By Vimla Sriram
I can’t remember if the teacup was under the cutting board or above it but obscured by the mountain of plates, glasses, and steel pots on the dishrack. All I remember is the crack of porcelain on the wooden floor and two pieces instead of one. Why I was a dam breached I couldn’t understand. I sobbed as if someone close had suddenly died, prompting my son to fix the cup like only a 12-year-old could, with a tape fastened over the crack like a sash around a broken beauty queen.
Acceptance, Both Ways
By Anita Vijayakumar
I was an untested psychiatry resident learning the intricacies of therapy. She was my first patient, a young woman who needed to unpack her suffering. She spread out her traumas like snow globes, delicate stories encased in fractured glass. What will you do with them? she asked without speaking.
Lima Bean
By Anna Chotlos
When my friend texts me her first ultrasound photo, it’s still early, 8 or 9 weeks. We hold our joy tenderly, hoping it sticks.
This is the first time I have looked closely at a sonogram, and to me, the baby looks like a lima bean or a popcorn kernel or a tadpole. Wet, blobby. Recognizable, but unfinished. A dark spot that might become an eye or an ear. A little notch that might be a mouth. The beginning of an umbilical cord.
The Bike Lesson
By Desiree Cooper
Jax perched on his brand-new bike. I stood beside him, a human kickstand.
“I can’t do this, Nana!” he yelled, his nervousness masquerading as anger. “It won’t stay up!”
“I’m right here. Put your feet on the pedals.”
My back groaned as my six-year-old grandson gave his body to the bike. The weight of his fears surprised me.
To the Men Who I’ve Talked Out of Leaving Their Wives
By Amber Wong
When you called, I was careful not to interrupt your soliloquy. Sometimes the best truth comes in fragments, unguarded bits of prose, an ugly tone or misshapen phrase that reveals much. Words, unfiltered, somehow arranged themselves into a story, and even without sturdy markers of time and place and who exactly you were worried about hurting, by the time you’d exhausted yourself you always came back to one question. Should I leave her?
Cast-Iron Generations
By Tonya Coats
The cast-iron skillet has been in our family five generations, since the early 1900s. Twice as thick as when it was forged, it has layers of black scales on the outside. An imperceptible skin inside. Every time I use the skillet, mothers from both sides of our family–mine, and my husband’s–arrive to teach me how to teach the next ones.
“Mommy, when will this be mine?” my daughter asks, tracing the hieroglyphs on the outside of the skillet, understanding how it was passed down from them to me.
Seven Weeks or About the Size of a Coffee Bean
By Christopher Notarnicola
The morning is here again. My fiancée and I have taken to acknowledging the miracle of recurrence. The water is hot again. The towel is dry again. The mirror is us again. And the coffee, about once a week, is the ever-coffee again ...
Goodnight Moon
By Cicily Bennion
Surely, in his two and a half years of living he’s seen the moon. But he looks at it now like it’s the first time. He knows it, yes, but only from his books on the shelf, the ones I read on nights I’m home for bedtime, when the sun is on the horizon and the blinds are closed. He presses his nose to the glass. The moon is a celebrity; he can’t help but gawk.
On the 20th Anniversary of 9/11
By Laura Joyce-Hubbard
I think of John Ogonowski, leaving his farm at dawn in his green Chevy pickup. John flew cargo planes in Vietnam, knew the Boeing 767 like creases in his palm...
Here I Am
By Caroline Sutton
Two-year-old Ella takes a stick and draws zigzags in the sand. She asks me to write her name; I say each letter aloud and she knows that these are the marks that make words that make the stories we read to her, which she inhabits and commits to memory. I have shown her footprints, hers and mine and a seagull’s and a dog’s. I wave at our shadows.
Gotcha Day
By Erika Nichols-Frazer
We adopted Nala the day my mother fell down the stairs. That wasn’t her name, but she didn’t look like a Mindy.
In the ICU waiting room, my boyfriend said, “We don’t have to look at dogs today.” I’d completely forgotten our plans. My mother lay in a narrow hospital bed, unconscious, neck in a brace, bruises everywhere. She looked impossibly small and pale, a porcelain doll...
Pedestrian Acts
By Susan Barr-Toman
We were late for an appointment. I wove through the afternoon crowd at a quick clip with my son and daughter, nine and six, following behind me like ducklings. Head down and shoulders bent, I had the posture of someone punched in the gut.
Days earlier my husband was diagnosed with cancer, and already surgeries, treatments, and scans scheduled. I lived on the verge of erupting...
Into the Answer
By Erin Murphy
Your high school teacher mother taught you a trick for taking comprehension tests: always skip ahead to read the questions before the passage.
(Why are the mother’s hands discolored?)
You remember her sitting at the kitchen table, her pen carving into the triplicate mimeograph sheets, the edges of her hands bruised with blue ink. Sometimes she’d let you grade her students’ papers—yes, the way Tom Sawyer “let” the other boys whitewash Aunt Polly’s picket fence.
You loved making red checks and Xs for the root of “salubrious” or the Italian city where Romeo and Juliet was set.
(What is the significance of “first”?)
It was in a classroom that she had her first heart attack...
Things to do in the Belly of Despair
By Kerry Herlihy
Blow out the candle that burned for his last days. Dump the OxyContin and morphine in the cat litter like the hospice nurse told you to do. Touch his cheekbones that emerged like knives these last few weeks. Fill a large pot and bathe him like you used to bathe your daughter, part by part. Open a window so his spirit can leave...
Everything You Hold Onto in Your Body Lets Go
By Billie Hinton
In autumn, my massage therapist comes to the barn, plugs in her electric pot to warm the large black stones she regularly returns to the river, whose current removes things bodies hold onto: the ache of arthritic knees, tight pelvises, a woman’s chorus of sharp edges, shrill songs of sore muscles and little heartaches...
On Turning Forty-Four
By Kim June Johnson
This was a particularly hard number for me, and in the back of my mind, I knew it was because the late Nora Ephron, in her book about aging as a woman, wrote about how much she regretted not wearing a bikini the entire year she was twenty-six and suggested to anyone reading that they...
Walk
By Beatrice Motamedi
I’m at my desk, playing with the idea of taking the day off, when the phone rings, and shit, it’s the landline, the number I dread, the one on too many contact lists and credit card applications to ditch, and unfortunately it’s in the bedroom, across my office and one hallway away, and even worse, I have to answer it, as I had a mammogram yesterday and I’m expecting a call from my doctor...
Delicate as a Hummingbird’s Heart
By Noah Davis
This past Saturday, the fire burning on the north side of the river jumped a ridge and lit another hillside of drought-stricken timber, sending a plume so high that the air turned red with the seared skin of Douglas fir and larch.
The Last Pie
By Jill Quandt
I take my grandma to the grocery store. While perusing the produce, I mention that it is my father-in-law’s birthday. She takes that to mean we are making a pie, and who am I to remind her that she doesn’t make pies anymore?
Dandelion Fritters
By Bex Hoffer
Fingers flower-yellow.
I want to make a poem from those words, but as always, line breaks trip me up like wires at ankle-height. Still, yes, my fingertips are tinged yellow, blessed by the blossoms of dandelion suns.
Istalif, Afghanistan, 2004
By Brandy Bauer
We picnic by firelight in the bombed-out carapace of a hotel, where a guard in tattered shawls sips tea, cradling his gun. Beyond the balcony, mud homes jut out from the snowy hills.
Reason Enough
By Sherrie Weller
A friend and I are at happy hour. Icy doubles swim in glasses before us. Recently discovered: We are both adopted. Blooming: An intimacy unwarranted by the length of time we’ve known each other. I describe growing up with an identical twin, wondering about our birthmother. Ask if she has done a search.
She tells me she lied to the Catholic Diocese in St. Paul, conjured a research paper on matrilineal genealogy for class at the University of Minnesota, gained access to the 1965 baptismal records on microfiche. She found her birthparents’ names, looked them up in the phone book, made her husband dial the number...
Gratitude
By Kathryn Petruccelli
Spring in a cold place. Which means everything is so heartbreakingly tender—tulips lifting their dusky prom skirts, dandelions twinkling in their green sky.
I've lived here a little while, this rural New England town, its six months of winter, a place accustomed to waiting for beauty to appear. I've left somewhere I loved to move far away in service to a restless heart, the bonus draw of family. In the time since, I've witnessed a father-in-law dissolve from brain cancer, a second-born survive the bypass machine, tiny heart sewn back together...
Eyelashes
By Monika Dziamka
The AC rattles above me, but all else is silent, so silent, so blissfully silent. My baby is asleep at grandma’s tonight, across town and across space so wide and deep and needed that I now almost don’t quite know what to do with all this time. (Write? Read? Sleep. Stretch?) But I’m hungry, too. (Order Indian? Pick up Thai? Leftovers. Make popcorn?) But I want to binge on TV, too. (Hulu? Netflix? HBO. Nightly news?) How can minutes move so differently when you’ve got a baby, and when you don’t...?
Confession
By Rachel Greenley
It happens six, maybe seven times a day. I'm crouched. He looks at me with those liquid eyes, his face in front of mine, his wet nose quivering, exploring my breath...
Zero at the Bone
By Heidi Czerwiec
John Cage experimented with silence in his music, after an experience in a completely soundproofed chamber—he realized that, far from silent, he could still hear his nervous and circulatory systems, his breath, a white noise.
Silence is impossibility.
Cage claimed he composed all the notes to 4’33”—also called the “Silent Sonata”—but that they were all silent...
Flower Salute
By Anne Leiby
The blush pink of the dogwood is still packed tightly into a bud on the small branch that floats among the other flowers. That tree, planted in your memory and now ten years old, has been with us as long as you have been gone...
Hard Frost
By Yelizaveta Renfro
On the morning of the day the jury would return, snow swirled with fallen white blossoms in the gutters of the streets. April can be cruel like that. The next day, as I drove, all over town I saw plants that had been protected from the hard frost with sheeting and tarps, and the covered shapes seemed to shift before my eyes—or rather, my mind contorted them—until they took on the outlines of human bodies—as though, after the guilty verdict, in the night, we had all dragged out our collected corpses, the unjustly dead, and left them in our yards, under bedsheets, to say: And what about this one?...
Amelioration
By Mariah Anne Agee
I want waking up to feel like shuffling a new deck of cards: smooth and full of intention. The citrus sun rises early now. I remember that my body is also a tender peach, wrinkling as I stretch to the horizon line. I will be a little kinder to this flesh, to these cells within me working the third shift just so I can smile at strangers I pass in the park...
Bird Families
By Renata Golden
"My mother taught me to look at birds by pointing out their details, like bill shape and breast color. She taught me the names for American Robin and House Sparrow..."
Developmental English
By Jessica Rapisarda
Julie’s name is Adriana or Alessandra. I can’t remember, because she insists on Julie. More American. It’s not that she doesn’t love Brazil, but she worries that her real name will be too big for American mouths...
Ticking
by Steph Liberatore
She wanted people to see the antique clock when they entered the house. That’s why she put it on the shelf to the left of the window, the one you see when you first come through the door. The black mantel clock, with its golden dragons for handles and clawed feet ...
Green Apples
By Brian M. Kohl
I cut green apples into fourths and then eighths. I slice them into smaller and smaller pieces, the flesh slippery in my fingers. I arrange them in a careful line on the plate, counting as I go—one through twenty-four ...
Retirement
By Michael Diebert
My father-in-law, Vietnam vet, ex-medic, sat in his low-slung love seat. The thermostat was set at 80. Outside was 100. Through the sliding glass, the Strip shimmered like an alternate planet ...
Buckeye Pyre
By Amy Wright
We circle the farm first, gathering storm-downed branches for the pyre of a fallen buckeye tree like funerary lilies, without mourning the giant whose dark-stare fruit we bucketed at harvest to safeguard the cattle. Half each chestnut sweet, the other lethal. “Only squirrels know the difference,” my grandfather would say. The colossal trunk’s rings indicate its seed found this streambed at the height of the 1918 influenza...
The Heavy Bag
By Maryam Ahmad
For three years of my teenage life, I fought. Around 5 PM each day, I’d walk into the boxing gym—a repurposed garage—and carefully wrap up my hands, winding the black cloth over and over my wrist and palm, in and out through my knuckles, until my hands felt safe. Then, I would start working the heavy bag, ducking and dipping and stepping around it as it swung back and forth, back and forth, in response to my hits. The coach, a vaguely sexist and perpetually sunburned man, would always comment on how hard I hit. "Damn, girl. You really hate that bag."...
Two Hot Zabagliones
By Lou Storey
Feeling lonely and hopeless, I went ahead anyway. Long before computers took over the planet, ManMate, a gay dating service, mailed me a multipage paper form to complete.
I had help.
“How is this?” I asked my friend Jill, handing her my completed self-description and candid photo...
Lamp Light
By Zoe Randolph
I’m not worried about the meat in the freezer or the milk in the fridge. The only concern I have about the sudden soupy darkness is how I can maximize my time spent soaking in it...
Blues
By Anne Pinkerton
He taught the dog to howl when it was just a puppy.
I’d find the two of them sitting on the couch together, both tipping their faces skyward, eyes closed, solemn, focused. The little beast mimicked his best friend, his idol, his everything—in harmony, they pursed their lips and aroooo-ed as loud as their lungs could push their animal voices...
The Inside of Bones
By Kelly McMasters
His small voice cuts a jagged line into the not-quite-morning quiet. My body reflexively lifts out of bed, finds its way over the piles of tiny cars and books, through the stone darkness of our new apartment, our first without his father. I steer myself into the bedroom he shares with his younger brother, find his bed, crawl in...
The Last Perfection
By Gary Finke
The week-old “Going out of Business” sign sagged in the store window the last night my father baked. Bread and sandwich buns near midnight. Coffee cakes and sweet rolls at two a.m. Last, as always, the deep-fried doughnuts were finished near dawn while my mother readied the display cases where cookies, cakes and pies were already waiting for their last opportunity to sell. At six-thirty, he filled cream puffs and whoopee pies, and then he drove home to sleep....
Life Takes Place Like This
By Miranda R. Carter
**Content Warning** This essay discusses suicide.
My student tells me she is going home and then is found hanging by a shower rod on Tuesday afternoon. We do not sleep. All that was hers is now ours to sort through. We speak about her now in past tense.
Filling Cupboards
By Danielle Madsen
You don’t start out with coffee cups. You start with single-serve espressos and chai lattes at the coffee shop around the corner from your co-op. But a coffee together after work becomes morning coffee for two. And, suddenly, you’ve moved in together and have cupboards to fill. So you do...
Resting Place
By Kate Levin
When we arrive at daycare, I step out of the car and close my door gently, hoping not to startle my son awake. As I open the back door to retrieve him from his car seat, I see the bird. ...
Ascension Garden
By Stacy Murison (reposted from May 9, 2016)
The first time, you drive by yourself. You have some idea you are going there, but are still surprised that you know the way, without her, through the turning and turning driveways. Left, left, left, left. Park near the rusted dripping spigot. ...
Merriment
By Chansi Long (reposted from May, 2 2016)
I was walking to the store with my brother when we stumbled upon a father teaching his daughter to ride a bike. He was in his early thirties, the age my father must have been when he left us, with a widow’s peak and roseate cheeks. The man clutched the bars of the bicycle and dashed along, keeping it balanced. ...
Home to Roost
By Vivian Wagner
I liked the hens, with their kind eyes and soft, red feathers. I was seven, and I wanted to sleep with them, to nestle with them, because they felt like a dozen mothers, all watching out for me. ...
My Father’s Only Recipe
By Kim Liao
First, take pork spare ribs. Hack them up with an impossibly large cleaver into bite-sized pieces. Rub them with a proprietary mix of star anise, black beans, garlic, soy sauce, hoisin sauce, ginger, and secrets. Never ask him what happened in Taiwan, or why his mother never spoke the name of her former husband again. ...
The Last To Turn In
By Katie Greulich
Everyone went to sleep, except my cousin and me. I lingered a bit, my own children upstairs, sprawled across air mattresses, or burrowed in rented cribs. He wanted to stay awake, to party. Or at least have a companion to watch It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. He keeps checking my reaction at the characters’ antics. I muster a smile. The curtains inside my brain are closing. His parents and sister are sleeping. I am responsible simply because I am awake...
The Extinction Museum: Exhibit #207 (Glass Coke Bottle—Labeled “Helium”)
By Tina May Hall
Parties were for destroying. You hit the patient hero with a stick until he broke open to rain down candy. Every wall was filled with pinholes and sword dents. In the backyard, your friends tore up the grass in handfuls, sundering unwary worms, leaving gouges to slip on after rain. One boy nearly drowned trying to bite an apple...
Ceremony
By Robert Barham
She dances beside the highway each morning. You’re driving your son to school, in thick traffic with lights to make, when you notice her across a stretch of construction and broken streets. Bearing marks of itinerancy and sleeping rough, she reaches the center of an empty lot, and it begins: a dancer’s poise with sure cadence and confident, inevitable steps...
Reclamation
By Justin Florey
The Army Corp of Engineers lowered the water level of the Mississippi River below St. Anthony Falls so they could inspect the locks. My wife took the kids down there at my suggestion. Children frolicked in areas where, in any other circumstance, they would surely drown...
Notes to My Father
By Kathy Fagan
On most surfaces in my house, you’ll find short notes I’ve written for my father. I flip the phone’s camera on FaceTime so he can read them when he can’t hear me. He mouths them slowly out loud...
Command
By John Bonanni
It’s nearing Easter, 2020. My lover, David, and I watch The Ten Commandments with Charlton Heston. We break it up across three days, one hour per day. I always associated Heston with the NRA, with white old man gun-toting Uhmerca toxic masculinity, but the more I watch, the more Moses’s shoulders and thighs seem to flex, seem to bulge out of the screen, oiled...
The Drive Home
By Kimberly Goode
We pulled out of the driveway. Our destination: Newark International Airport for a pre-dawn flight back to Seattle. My father drove his Ford Taurus just below the speed limit. Staring out the window, I thought of all the times we’d travelled this road together before. For Sunday trips to the zoo. To grab a birthday present for a party...
Reading
By Susan Hodara
I am reading. I have spun into the writer’s words, how his grandmother curled and uncurled the telephone cord around her fingers. I remember those curly cords, how the coils unspooled when you walked around, and then jumped back, spiraling in on themselves, hanging like a wonky rubber ringlet...
On the Afternoon I Write My Husband Another Note
By Amanda Yanowski
I sit in my gray office and scribble words onto a piece of stationary I wish I could remember picking out, yellow flowers wrapping around the edges.
Believe me when I say I do not have a choice. And I am so sorry. And I tried to fix myself...
Not That Kind of Royalty
By Lea Page
I’ve learned that jokes are the best and maybe only antidote to terror.
My daughter often reminds me, “Don’t relive past traumas,” so I won’t describe the horror show of dental malfeasance that got me here...
Resonance
By Nancy Jorgensen
A fifty-something woman, wearing a faded floral dress, showed me the antique pump organ. “No one plays anymore,” she said, her wooden cooking spoon in hand. “And I could use the $150.” She went back to her farmhouse stove to stir a pot that smelled of onion and sage while my new husband and I—some said too young for marriage at only 22—whispered about the price. And whether the organ could survive the long trip home in our borrowed pickup truck...
Seasonal
By Laura Marshall
I don’t care for the pie, really, the corn syrup pulling at my teeth. But shelling is a calendar as much as it is culture, making me remember where we are in the world, when we are in the world. Because it is pecan season, it is pecan pie season—which makes it the holiday season, even though we live in a winterless land...
The Bends of the Kickapoo
By Craig Holt Segall
One summer, we glided downstream in the old metal canoe, my father and I. He sat in back, in his old jean shorts and his not clean shirt, his thin legs scabbed from falls on long runs. Around us was the thick peace of August: rising trills of birdsong, deep thrum of a far-off tractor. This was when I was just out of adolescence, still close to mornings when, small in the tent, I would wake at dawn and watch the leaf shadows on the canvas, my father sleeping next to me.
This is Orange
By Jill Kolongowski
Around 10:30 this morning the world is orange. The sky, the houses, the air. Inside, my new baby is trying to roll over. She wants to do it so badly she tries to do it in her crib instead of sleeping. She is hopeful. She is determined. She tried it yesterday, and tries again today. She is so close. She does not notice the orange. This orange is not fire, but an atmospheric phenomenon, the result of wildfire ash high above the marine layer, scattering the sunlight into color...
Red Talisman
By Christina Rivera Cogswell
My brother retraced my father's steps with a camera. He called his collage of ugly photos our dad’s “street life”: cement sidewalks, hanging traffic lights, squat buildings with short awnings, a white-rimmed sign with WALL ST marching across. My father isn’t in the photos because no photos were taken of him...
Talk to Her
By Michael McAllister
I once took a job with a major online retailer, listening to the words that people spoke in their own homes to a voiced virtual assistant I’ll call Amaya. Our ragtag team of English and Linguistics majors tapped away on laptops, categorizing the words for the developers so she’d respond better over time, listening to the private words of a faceless people...
On Sam Mountain
By Mary Lane Potter
At the peak—932 feet above the Mekong floodplain—beyond the holy caves and the Cham, Buddhist, Hindu, and Mother-Goddess temples that litter the twisting pilgrim road, a mother and father are teaching their young son how to pray...
Purse Candy
By Cora Waring
There’s a single, beat-up black jack bobbing around my purse, its wrapper feathered from accidental collisions with lipstick tubes and wallet, the once-bright stripes gone gray...
The Perfect Day
By Lisa Hadden
The images are still with me thirty-five years later. The weather in the Northeast Michigan woods on Grand Lake is warm, heavy with fragrance of late summer, cedar pines, sandy soil, the water clapping the edge of the land. The turquoise sky turns to twilight with a soft glow of lavender rising...
Wildflowers
By Brie Deyton
Another set of packed bags. After another get out now. This time my mother, sister, and I landed in a trailer across the abandoned tracks. Fake wood paneling on the walls repelled all light, and years of cigarette smoke made every surface feel singed...
Le Sacrifice
By Terri Kent
Mom, sitting on the floor among a group of cross-legged Girl Scouts, teaches us a song in a language none of us know...
Rubber Tourniquets
By Kristin Engler
My four-year-old son plays with the blue rubber tourniquet from his latest hospitalization. A nurse tied it around his arm to insert an IV into the tender part of his forearm near the crook of his elbow...
You Should Ask for More
By Rachel Sudbeck
“Am I sad?” I ask my dog, because it’s not something I recognize anymore. Sadness had come so thick and urgent for a while that the quieter emotions don’t register like they used to. She looks back at me, mid-squat, doesn’t seem to have an answer. ...
Car Keys
By Bridget Lillethorup
“I can drive today,” my partner said, and I tossed him the keys over the hood of my 1999 Jeep Cherokee.
Up went the key to my mom’s house, which opened a small home of wall-papered, floral prints and a retired woman shuffling in a bathrobe, slowing sipping coffee, leaving lipstick stains on the mug, and listening, always giving space to listen....
Real Mom
By Mee-ok
Until I decided to come to Korea, I hadn’t realized how special my mother was—how selfless, how enlightened. Most adoptive parents of her generation can’t understand that searching for our origins isn’t a direct affront to them. In truth, it has nothing to do with them at all. ...
Jars of Daybreak
By Robert Erle Barham
Roused before dawn, my siblings and I stood at the edge of the kitchen and marveled at gleaming red jars that filled the room. Our parents shuffled wordlessly from stove to kitchen table and back again, their bright faces like blacksmiths’ flushed by forge light, and we stared in wonder as they stirred, poured, and sealed...
After Hours
My grandfather wakes, confused and flooded with his body’s toxins. "Sit down," he tells my grandmother. "We’re going around a bend." He thinks they’re on the train forty years ago. He reaches for invisible handholds and says, "It’s bumpy. Will you please sit down, dear?"
The China Tea Set
By Aisha Ashraf
The china tea set, wrapped in tissue paper, nestles in its warped cardboard box on the shelf inside my mother’s wardrobe. She draws it down gently, as though not to wake it, places it on the bed, slides the lid off...
Photograph
By Sarah Ives
I push through the brambles and climb over the rotting, peeling fence that inevitably grabs at the cuff of my pants. Getting snagged, I always seem to fall cursing onto the beach, an unfitting way to enter the quiet beauty...
A Good Day to Die
By Shannon Cram
What I remember is the salt that formed in his pores like crystalline grains of sand. A million tiny specks covering his skin. Everywhere, everywhere, everywhere...
The door with the fresh coat of turquoise paint and brass hinges
By Jennifer Todhunter
I open the door to see if you’re there, the door with the fresh coat of turquoise paint and brass hinges. There is a noise, a constant; it could be the rain or the thick of my heart in my eardrums...
Grandmom’s House
By Karen Langley Martin
Our house was like a radio playing six stations at once: brothers arguing, piano keys banging, lawn mower mowing, blender blending, phone ringing, dog barking...
Before the First Frost
By Stacy Murison
The yellowed aspen leaves shimmer like so many pennies against the setting sun, almost frantic in their last-dance enthusiasm for the night’s forecasted hard frost...
Mom’s Nighty
By Jonathan Rentler
I started wearing Mom’s nighty after she died. “You don’t remember?” Grandma asks. “You used to spray her perfume on ribbons.”...
Black Hair Matters
By Marsha Lynn Smith
My toddler grandchild sits still on the carpet between my knees, her back cushioned against the sofa. I consider detangling her springy hair coils. Should I fix her hair similar to the way my mother did mine?...
The Greatest Unease
By Irene Fick
Flying over deep water in the inscrutable dark. We are doomed. I hear the pilot slur his words. My neck is stiff. I feel a headache coming on. My legs begin to cramp. The anxiety pills make me nauseous....
He Gave Her the Honey-Sweet Berry of the Pomegranate to Eat
By R.S. Wynn
In the produce aisle, I consider genetically modified pomegranates: ruby globes that overflow my palms cupped together. But the one I choose to bring home I pluck with my thumb and forefinger....
Your Dad’s Not Here
By Susan Hirsch
“You don’t have to go in, Mom,” my son said through the phone. I was standing on the porch, holding the phone, and knocking on his dad’s door....
Convergence
By Diane LeBlanc
Rain falling on the cabin roof isn’t music or balm or metaphor. For two days and two nights, it’s nothing but water saturating the stairs I descend in the dark to go to the outhouse while my husband sleeps....
False Spring
By Stephanie Cox
Fourteen cedar waxwings cluster in the apple tree. The bright February sun sharpens their dark masks and perky crests as they bounce from branch to branch...
Two Forms
By Deborah Elderhorst
Henry Moore’s bronze sculpture Large Two Forms sits like a pair of discarded vertebrae on the pavement outside the art gallery, where small children clamber and slide through its round openings on their bellies and backsides. Teenagers, too, are drawn to these primal shapes....
Fear of Poetry
By Claudia Monpere
My beloved friend dying of cancer said she’d been afraid of poetry for too long. I suggested a poetry party....
The Perfumed Winds of May
By Leanne Ogasawara
In the Japanese taxonomy of breezes, the perfumed winds blow just before the south-easterly winds of the rainy season, which arrive later in the month. Known as plum rains—so heavy, the downpours are said to knock the ripening plums right off their branches....
Jumping in Leaves
By Joseph Gross
Somewhere after the turn of the millennium I slid from leaf jumper to leaf raker, and so on this smoky November afternoon I hold down my job for the boy in front of me during what will be his only non-digital hour of the day....
The Entertainer
By Amber Emanuel
When my mother sits in front of our antique upright piano, it is almost always Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer.” Almost always only the refrain....
Cord
By Kat Read
I think the apartment is horrible––the bathroom sink is in the bedroom, the blind in the shower falls down every other day, the sliding closet door skitters out of its track. Everything feels rickety and as though it is about to topple, especially the life that I am living inside it....
Marco Polo in Missoula
By Emily Withnall
My house is leaky. Wisps of cold air seep in—but my kids remind me this isn’t possible, that scientifically the warm air is leaking out....
These Italian Pastries
By Amy Suardi
These Italian pastries were decorated by an 87-year-old woman in a drawn-out process involving almond paste and mandarin oranges. I bought them at a cliffside stand in a cellophane bag tied with red curling ribbon on the Sicilian island of Lipari....
Beginning of Spring
By Leanne Ogasawara
The Chinese calendar had it right. Insisting that spring begins in February is to begin a season at the beginning, when the season is only just awakening, a quiet stirring....
In the Car She Drives, the Air is Always Fresh(ened)
By Carla Panciera
A cardboard pine tree of Caribbean Colada swings from the rearview mirror, the mirror in which my daughter considers whether she needs eyelash extensions, teeth whitening....
How Do They Find Me?
By Donna Steiner
My mother’s greatest pleasure since her stroke is to sit in the courtyard of the rehab center. It’s not a beautiful space, just a square of concrete surrounded by high walls....
The Delicacy
By John Yu Branscum & Yi Izzy Yu
The Delicacy by Ji Yun (1724-1805), Imperial Librarian and Investigator of the Strange...
Another Workday
By Robert Erle Barham
“Daddy, are you going to work?” my son asks when he sees me wearing a jacket and tie before I leave for campus and a day of teaching. Years ago my father’s work boots and overalls prompted the same question from me before I was old enough to join him on the farm....
My Sister Passes Me on a Bench at the Zoo
By Misty Urban
On a bench in the zoo a girl walks past me wearing my sister’s face—my sister’s smooth, pre-teen face, before acne, before irony, before the long humped shuffle of illness....
Picking Up Lint
By Mary Potter
My dad was an exacting man. When he ran a motor assembly plant in Belgium, he plastered the shop floor, break rooms, and bathrooms with signs that urge-warned in Flemish, WHAT YOU DO, DO IT RIGHT!...
Eulogy for a Dog with Sad Eyes
By Margaret Emma Brandl
You were always underfoot, in fibers of the carpet, your big shape blocking doorways and chair-paths until you decided on your own where to go....
Home to Roost
By Vivian Wagner
I liked the hens, with their kind eyes and soft, red feathers. I was seven, and I wanted to sleep with them, to nestle with them, because they felt like a dozen mothers, all watching out for me. ...
Here, Look
My husband hadn't meant to render us in silhouette. He was a novice, the camera new and heavy in his hands. As we gazed out the window he didn't realize that by aiming into the sun he'd cast us in shadow, erasing specifics.
Floodscape
Come spring, there is imbalance—too much snow that’s too quick to melt. The river becomes my backyard. The walnut grove sinks first, followed by the meadow. A day or two later, the river overcomes the pond banks. We are hemmed in.
Woods Cove
The life in these coastal margins is sparser now, stripped of extravagance, down to survivors. A few darting fish, the odd crab, glossy black clusters of mussels clinging here and there at the brim of the booming surf.
It Happened in Brooklyn
He taped her photograph to the inside of his military locker. When the war ended, they married and lived in an apartment without running water in the kitchen, so they carried their dirty dishes to the bathtub.
A Loss for Words
This Chinese bowl, smooth in my hands, white as bone, entwined with blue dragons, reminds me of my friend Joyce’s mom. Faizai she’d christened me.
Weight of Bones
A loon is not crazy for spending more time in the water than in the air, though the other birds may think so. He is made for it. Unlike his feathered brethren, his bones are solid.
Scent’s Memory
My son pops the lid on the swing-top bale jar, and using both arms to hold onto it, presses his face into the opening, taking a big whiff.
Clementine Time
Dad is hungry for a clementine; my three-year-old daughter Sarah is hungry for a clementine. I peel one for her and feed her the wedges; my mother peels one for my father.
Simplify, Simplify
By Jan Priddy
This could be the morning I slide out the door instead of back under sheets and escape before I drink my coffee. My arms unburdened, no one calling me back, no shame or remorse to shadow my escape. Away...
Simplify, Simplify
My former life neatly gone and never was. Sell the car and take the bus. Live within my means.
Chosen for Something
By Stacy Boe Miller
Sometimes as a child I would brush my grandfather's thinning hair. He was a long haul trucker turned Pentecostal preacher who mostly showed affection through prayer and cash money, both of which he handed out at random to his grandkids. The chance to be physically close to him made me feel as though I’d been chosen for something special...
Chosen for Something
Sometimes as a child I would brush my grandfather's thinning hair. He was a long haul trucker turned Pentecostal preacher who mostly showed affection through prayer and cash money, both of which he handed out at random to his grandkids.
Sneakers in Sand (repeat)
By Dina Relles
The baby's shoes were nowhere.
That morning was spent in the chaotic swirl of cleaning and packing the vacation house. Countertops lined with coffee cups, milky-bottomed cereal bowls, last laundry loads, shouts up the staircase, don’t forget the shampoo in the shower! It was New Year’s Eve. We had a flight to catch...
Sneakers in Sand (repeat)
A deep, irrational sadness swelled at the thought of my son’s sweet shoes sitting at the shoreline as night fell. The waves lapping relentlessly, the mysterious draw of the ocean depths, the heavy awareness that, when it comes to water, what goes in does not return.
Ritual (repeat)
By Kelly Morse
Most nights I nurse my four-month-old daughter to sleep. The internet connection is terrible in our bedroom, the light thrown by the little green glass lamp not enough to read by, so I end up sitting in the semi-dark, looking across the bed to the window, or down upon the face of my baby in her steady, drowsy pleasure...
Ritual (repeat)
The first couple of months, I listened to the dry rattle that preceded the radiator's strange atonal song. I watched ice crawl up the sill, watched storms fling themselves across the prairie, flapping tree limbs across the neighbor's outside light.
Mars and a Reflection of Mars (repeat)
By Carolee Bennett
"There are two red planets tonight," I say. And you reply, "What a brave universe." And I feel brave. Two 30-lb packs hang near the tent we pitched just before it got dark enough to need headlamps. It’s Night One of this backpacking trip, and I’m an amateur, clumsy at everything, even walking. But right now, we are the only humans on the peninsula at Pharaoh Lake. And we divvy up the skies between us: one for me and one for you. The night’s so black stars reflect on the lake. Mars, too...
Mars and a Reflection of Mars (repeat)
It’s Night One of this backpacking trip, and I’m an amateur, clumsy at everything, even walking. But right now, we are the only humans on the peninsula at Pharaoh Lake. And we divvy up the skies between us: one for me and one for you.
The End of the Movie (repeat)
By Christopher Bundy
Today: summer afternoon on the front porch as thunderheads grow over the top of a giant oak. In the yard you perform perfect cartwheels, your legs long and straight in the air.
Watch this, Daddy, you say,
and execute another textbook cartwheel before you bounce up the steps to sit in my lap and rest your head against mine. You stare at the darkening sky. A breeze lifts your hair as distant thunder rumbles...
The End of the Movie (repeat)
And I see it too—the end of the movie. I play my part, holding your slight frame in my oversized hands.
Bare, Naked (repeat)
By Andrea Fisk Rotterman
Rain falls, dimpling puddles.
I kick off my clogs. My toenails shine like sparkling pumpkin peel. I slide my underwear and jeans down my legs, unsnap my bra, pull my sweatshirt over my head, lay my folded clothes on my shoes. I cross my arms over my silicone implants, icy to the touch in the November chill...
Bare, Naked (repeat)
Isis, the photographer, is making portraits of 800 mastectomy survivors, the same number of breast cancer diagnoses in the United States each day. Her vision of beauty is inspired by Ancient Greek sculptures, pitted by weather and wind, missing a nose or an arm.
The Teacups (repeat)
By Pamela Rothbard
At the boardwalk, everything is past its prime: sweating hot dogs, mashed bags of cotton candy, melting ice cream. The workers move by rote--lifting and lowering the gate, pulling up on harnesses, scanning tickets. I slump in line. My daughter presses her whole body against the bars that separate us and the ride. As we board the teacups, the song, “Hey Mickey,” blares...
The Teacups (repeat)
At the boardwalk, everything is past its prime: sweating hot dogs, mashed bags of cotton candy, melting ice cream. The workers move by rote--lifting and lowering the gate, pulling up on harnesses, scanning tickets. I slump in line.
Playboy (repeat)
When my mother caught Chris and me looking at Playboy, we knew we were in trouble, but to my surprise she did not get angry.
Playboy (repeat)
When my mother caught Chris and me looking at Playboy, we knew we were in trouble, but to my surprise she did not get angry. She took me into the house and pulled out the large glossy art books with paintings by the Impressionists. “A woman’s body is beautiful,” she told me...
Stand Up Tall
Night sets me free, free from the need to know, free to be, free to go, free from the face of God staring down, free from the world around, from the hours that chain me down.
Stand Up Tall
By Allen M. Price
My father turns his head, puts me on the floor, opens the screen, and walks out the back door. Just the silhouette of the bare trees shadowing night's sky is all I can see. I stand there for long minutes listening as night whispers peace. Night sets me free, free from the need to know, free to be, free to go, free from the face of God staring down, free from the world around, from the hours that chain me down...
Those Days
In 1976, when you were still alive,
I wrecked my car on 14th Street
in D.C. on our first date.
Those Days
By Nikki Hardin
In 1976, when you were still alive,
I wrecked my car on 14th Street
in D.C. on our first date.
ME: A single mother and student in your “Death and Dying” course...
His Pockets (repeat)
Experience has taught me to turn the pant legs out to see if anything moves. Has he captured some critter and forgotten it there? Using my thumbs, I push the fabric inside out. I’m careful to do this over a container.
Lightening Up (repeat)
My brother and I grab hold of dangling metal chains fastened to schoolyard swings in this expanse of crabgrass, red dirt, goalposts, and hard bleachers, where he'd slapped the face of the sky with baseballs all those years ago, where I'd ducked every flying thing—small-town insults and countless foul tips.
Lightening Up (repeat)
By Laurie Granieri
My brother and I grab hold of dangling metal chains fastened to schoolyard swings in this expanse of crabgrass, red dirt, goalposts, and hard bleachers, where he'd slapped the face of the sky with baseballs all those years ago, where I'd ducked every flying thing—small-town insults and countless foul tips...
Rocket Scientist (repeat)
My father was a rocket scientist for NASA, so the idea that a person could be anything, in this world or beyond, was real to me. With his telescope we peered through the reaches of time, to stars and planets light years away.
Rocket Scientist (repeat)
By This One Guy
As a child, when adults asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I had plenty of answers, but they all sounded like Halloween costumes. Race-car driver. Astronaut. Olympic track star. My father was a rocket scientist for NASA, so the idea that a person could be anything, in this world or beyond, was real to me...
Missing (repeat)
You have been ours for ten months, and tomorrow, the state will return you to your mother.
Missing (repeat)
By
You have been ours for ten months, and tomorrow, the state will return you to your mother.
Not ours, of course. We know. Foster parents have no rights, not really...
Kinetic Energy (Repeat)
As sunshine dropped behind the buildings up the hill, we rendezvoused to march the streets. The Dykes on Bikes ripped by, leading the way, two gals to a bike, bridal veils drifting behind. Loud-as-shit motors rippled inside our chests over the constant song of women’s voices.
Kinetic Energy (repeat)
By Sam Brighton
Weeks after California first legalized queer marriages but before the voters snatched them away in 2008, my girlfriend introduced me to the dyke march. Women of every kind gathered in Dolores Park to lounge about the hill and drink liquor and crack “lick her” jokes...
The Dying Room
By Abigail Thomas
When he woke again he questioned how had he come to be here in this terrible room, who had allowed it to happen? And he raged at his wife for betraying him, and when in her pained look he could read nothing he understood, I should never have trusted you, he said and went on that way like a bath overflowing until his voice softened, I loved you passionately, always, and let his head fall back on the pillow...
The Dying Room
I loved you passionately, always, and let his head fall back on the pillow. She wasn’t his wife anymore, but she would always be his wife.
A Perceivable Soul
The last time we saw her, two weeks before she died, her dementia seemed to have taken everything from her. The traits we thought particularly hers were no longer visible to us. We could discern nothing of her intelligence, her compassion, her vitality, her humor, her charm.
Like Breath, Like Doors
I woke in 3 a.m. darkness to what sounded like a barking seal. It was my husband—teeth chattering, too weak to stand, and too confused to speak. I called 911 and paramedics arrived to find him gasping for air at 107 degrees.
Like Breath, Like Doors
By Anne McGrath
I woke in 3 a.m. darkness to what sounded like a barking seal. It was my husband—teeth chattering, too weak to stand, and too confused to speak. I called 911 and paramedics arrived to find him gasping for air at 107 degrees...
How to Leave Without Saying Goodbye
By Kristin Tenor
Remember that afternoon you asked me to be your accomplice, your getaway driver, your ticket to freedom? Side by side in the front of your rusted Chevrolet—I, at the wheel and you, your parchment-thin eyelids closed in a state of ecstasy...
The Art of Icebergs
By Sharon Goldberg
In Jokulsarlon Lagoon, at the edge of Vatnajokull, Iceland's largest glacier, ten of us and Erik, our guide, bounce bounce bounce in a Zodiac boat. We are here to see icebergs, calves of the glacier, chunks that break off and fall into the water...
What Dreams May Come
By Gina Williams
If it wasn't for me, maybe he'd still be dreaming. When I told my Dad I wanted to live forever, he said, "Just wait 'till you get to be my age, then you'll wish you were dead." I was eight. He was twenty-eight. He was always joking, never kidding...
Family Portrait
By Laura S. Distelheim
Yesterday, when I was riding the train north from Chicago back to the suburb where I live, I happened to look up from the newspaper I was reading just as the tracks veered up alongside the back of a faded brown brick building, where I saw two children seated at a kitchen table in one of its windows, with their homework spread out before them and their mother standing close behind them, leaning over, pointing to something on one of the pages...
Cold (repeat)
By Kate Hopper
On the hottest days in San Vicente, I sit on the front porch of my host family's house, sweat dripping from under my arms, dust turning to mud on my salt-streaked legs. I watch the heat shimmer up from the dirt road, dissolving into blue sky. On these days, I long for snow, hunger after the numbing cold of January in Minnesota...
Peaches (repeat)
By Elizabeth Paul
The peach's soft flesh is so barely protected by its thin and fuzzy skin that I think it can't possibly be serious, but rather a jubilant sunburst, radiant and unworried in the brief noon of its summered existence, simply satisfied with the bright sweetness of its being. I take eight of them from a dusty crate at the farmer's market and place them in a bag. On the bus ride home, I hold the bag in my lap and feel their round sun-touch on my legs...
Jesus, the Wonder Bread of Life
By Rachel Rueckert
Mom gave me the idea, an object lesson given to her as a girl. "Pass it around," I said to my Bible study class. After a pause, the other preteens passed around the slice of Wonder Bread...
Perennial
By Kristine Jepsen
Yesterday my uncle Russ, my dad's older brother, texted me a video of a peony bush in bloom. The plant isn't his—he left the farm where it grows, in the remains of his mother's garden, to become a middle-school band director a half-century ago. But he can't stop tending things, a dogged farmer...
Very Large Array
By Ann Vallee
While traveling in New Mexico, I made a pilgrimage to the high desert to see the Karl G. Jansky Array, curious to witness a telescope as big as a valley.
An hour up an empty road, I come to a towering dish antenna, and then another and another, lined up like cairns across the sprawling plain...
Midnight Feedings
By Alexa Dodd
We are limbs, braided and heavy, under sheets reluctant to release us. We are dreams interrupted, sleep sliced away like an appendage, the knife a familiar siren, filling the space between walls. We are silhouettes, faceless shapes against muted window glow...
Young Moons
By Melissa Sevigny
The moon drifts in the west, too thin to be called a crescent, Venus above like a sleeping child lowered by invisible hands into a cradle. It's a glimmer in the sunset sky above a skyline of pine, a sweep of summer grass...
Life Science
By Michelle Hope
You taught me, once, about the Swainson's thrush—its call like an invitation to another world: a swirling up of sound, unseen. Teach me the names of all the birds you know, and how they sing—the Northern shovler, the greylag goose, the magnificent frigate—so when you hear that call to another world—the snowy egret, the golden-crowned kinglet—you’ll know I’ve heard it, too...
Back Aisles (repeat)
By Ashley Hutson
The library building was my body like your children are your body, like your spouse is your body. Its wood and glass grew out of my chest. It came with a key and code...
Mosque/Musk
By Heidi Czerwiec
I want to tell you that the word 'musk' comes to us from the Sanskrit mushkas, meaning ‘testicle,’ testimony to its source in the aromatic abdominal sacs of musk deer...
Say When, Say It Louder
By Rachael Peckham
You pinned me to the basketball court in the middle of gym class while Mrs. Thompson was busy tending to a "situation" in the locker room, or off fetching ice from the cafeteria. Whatever drew her away, you seized the moment...
Ghost Sigh
By Terry Parker
I survey the elegant glass skyline crowded on the tray: the fine-boned Chanel, curvy Burberry, sleek Cabochard. The bottles display various levels of fragrant amber liquid, belying their owner’s favor...
Forced Quince, as Study
By Arra Ross
The way, on the fourth day, the sepals' little leaflets, grown twice yesterday's size to a fourth inch, have curled back–like legs spread or backs arched—from the buds, and....
Pooled in Ripples
By Holly Pelesky
I wasn't like the other 22-year-olds after you, carelessly wearing bright bikinis. I was too preoccupied with how I looked suddenly: child bearing hips, a soft middle....
Miracle at Delancey Street
By Jean-Marie Saporito
My drive to the Delancey Street Christmas Tree lot begins on snowy roads through a canyon hemmed by pinion and sage studded cliffs and the icy Rio Grande....
Hair and Nails
By Mary Elizabeth Reilly-McGreen
Jen was so venomous that I stopped having my students read their journal entries aloud. She said such cutting things unsolicited. She made a student cry just by staring at him....
Standoff at Wolf Creek
By Rachel Smith
I tell Cory "no" again. I can't help him resurrect dinosaurs using chicken eggs, even if I am impressed that an eight-year-old already knows so much about genetics and paleontology....
When and How
By Anna Claire Beasley
1) A tent flap When the zipper teeth cut the air, filling the tent, humid from a night of bodies letting out breath after breath....
Eighteen, Both of Us
By Sarah Weaver
And still unkissed. Blame it on our strict Christian homes, the rules at the Bible school we were attending, guilt, or just plain old nerves....
Correction
By Sian Griffiths
I am correcting your typos (fallow becoming follow, gooing becoming going), correcting the interesting but incorrect with the boring and banal because what you meant was boring and banal....
Art Lesson
By Joanne Lozar Glenn (reposted from July 18, 2016)
They saved it for Fridays. Every teacher had the same projects. Fall: iron leaves between waxed paper. Winter: chalk snow scenes on black construction paper. Spring: draw daffodils. Except for Miss Malik. She was young, pretty, and not a nun....
The Day to Day (repeat)
By Jessica Terson
Sifting the flour. Squeezing the lever once. And then waiting. For a moment, it is winter again. I take my finger and make snow angels in the little blue bowl. After you died, they said the only thing to do was keep on living....
Window Vent
By Lynn Barrett
You take me for a ride in a sixties Oldsmobile. The radio doesn't work and you had to put additive in the gas....
My Grandmother’s Pie Plate
By Kiley Bense
I'm the one filling it now, and I've never minded sugar under my fingernails less. Its surface is dark with shine; it's been swallowing butter and heat for two lifetimes at least....
The Band Reunited and We All Bought Tickets
By Darlene Young
Praise God for a venue with a parking lot....
Vantage Point
By Donna Steiner
Some boys found a little brown bat in the parking lot outside the surgeon's office. Delicate as a tea bag, they poked it with a stick, kicked it....
A Grandmother Listens
By Gail Hosking
She is a bird in song with whole consonants flying out of the cave of her tiny mouth, the tones airborne like a floating leaf. She hands me a block, and with it comes language not yet molded into comprehension, but so sweet, that I listen carefully like one does on a forest walk....
A Total Solar Eclipse Is Visible from Any Given Point on Earth Once Every 375 Years, on Average
By Catherine Pierce
We'd gone to the lake to watch. We had the special glasses, and I toggled between gaping at the razor-precise disappearing of the sun and looking down at my children to make sure they both had their glasses properly affixed.
Away and Away, Then To: A Memoir
By Susan Rukeyser
The placenta blocked my exit. I was lifted from my mother just in time. London, 1968—bound for my father's USA. The month between Martin and Bobby; I imagine everyone sad.
In Answer to Fire
By Maya Khosla
For a long time, we could not go back. But once we were done averting our eyes, once we had mourned and banished all smoldering thoughts about the tribe of blackened trees replacing the known world for now and another season, and the last long fingers of smoke were ushered out by wind, a ticking began....
Walking
By Jia Lim
I do not want to be naked. The thought consumes me to the point of obsession. As we crunch across the luminous blue-gray glacier, as we delicately spear a rack of the best lamb I've ever had in my life, as we drive for hours in the liquid darkness searching for the northern lights, my mind churns over scenarios....
Visitation (repeat)
By Kelsey E. Moore
On the porch, under a Blood Moon, our fire is dying down, so we wear wool blankets over our shoulders. We're drinking cider warmed in a pan on the stove, splashed into mugs with whiskey....
Interruptions (rerun)
By Sheldon Lawrence
Seek stillness. Close your eyes, relax in the lotus position, and breathe deeply. But hold on tight. Search every corner of the cosmos and you find only a universe in motion....
Waiting for Owls (repeat)
By Mark Liebenow
Evening returns to the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and the land cools. Day follows the sun across the valley floor and up into the mountains in the west. Birds settle down for the night.
Mail Order
By Ksenia Panova
You know what I heard, I heard your mother was a mail order briiiiiiide. The girl with a thoroughly sensible name in my first-grade class drew out the last word, and I struggled with the new sentence structure....
Leave-Taking
By Chris Erickson
Sassafras, shagbark hickory, spicebush, paw paws and sycamores marked the descent to the creek. The untillable acres, as they call them. The hills too steep and outcrops too rocky. The forgotten backs of farms....
The Petals of Summer
By Marybeth Holleman
They lie like bits of tissue on the bathroom floor rug, caught in the fibers; I bend to pick them up and see the yellow and pink threadworn veins, dry and broken and translucent pieces of geranium and nasturtium....
This Is What Men Do
By Diana Rico
At the tiny Eretz Shalom Cemetery on the mesa south of Taos, I feel like I have stepped into a John Ford Western. The impossibly big New Mexican sky dwarfs the mourners standing in sagebrush around a six-foot-deep hole in the ground....
Wish You Were Here
By Sunni Wilkinson
Our three-year-old sits on my husband's shoulders, bouncing. Red rock and yellow cottonwood trees and blue sky surround us. Fall break in Capitol Reef, Utah, and we’re winding up a trail we’ve never hiked before to see an arch...
The River and How She Heals
By Amber D. Stoner
When the house went cold - not the oxygen and nitrogen, but the mood, the atmosphere around my parents - when that froze into stasis, into wariness, into step-lightly-quietly-invisibly, I would retreat outside where I could breathe without...
The Dancer
By Jan McGuire
Mom danced with The Dancing Divas - women in their seventies proudly performing in over thirty elaborate costumes. Accessories included a Fedora with a plastic mafia machine gun, a red suitcase doubling as a small platform for tapping to...
Learning to Tell Time
By Cathy Luna
Learning to Tell Time Corpus Christi, Texas: February 1, 1969 It will always be eighty degrees in Corpus and I will always be six when the telegram comes. For me, this day will always have passed as if it were any other. I will always be inside...
Reunion Tour
By Renee Nicholson
Thud of drums, The Edge’s guitar lick reverberating in our sternums, and the first flinty sound of Bono’s voice. We never expected...
Controlled Burn
by Traci Brimhall
Spring is the season for burning on the plains. Ranchers across the tall grass prairies of Eastern Kansas watch the forecast for the stillest days, when wind nests between mountains, before they bring the driptorches to the fields.
Non-Transferable
By Jen Sammons
The instant I pull into the gas station, he starts screaming, starts pummeling the back of my seat with his gray and green Velcro sneakers....
Afterglow
By Elissa Favero
By morning, feathers had settled lightly in the corners of the bathroom. They swept up into the air, though, as I moved past. Down, up and down. One brushed the nape of my neck as I stepped from the shower, and clamped there to damp skin. A torn comforter; a small domestic catastrophe....
Little Traveling Altars
By Olivia Dunn
I am calling my current situation 'vow of poverty' because that sounds much nobler than 'slumming' or 'lazy.' Vow of poverty helps me remember that the reason I will eat chickpeas for dinner for the next three nights is because there is a larger goal at hand....
Cooking for Grandpa
By Rhonda Owen
Grandpa slumps on the three-legged stool, his clouded brown eyes intent on me as I reach into a cabinet drawer to scoop flour for dredging pieces of chicken soaking in a bowl of buttermilk....
Afghan Roses
By Francisco Martinezcuello
In Massoud's Circle, weathered plastic shopping bags are captured by the thorns of Afghan roses. Armored vehicles crisscross in formation. Liberators with their guns pointed bully civilian cars to halt. My convoy breezes by, failing to free the bags from their thorny prison....
Living With Ian
By Mia Aguilera
My brother Ian and I live in the Pacific Northwest. We have a small brick house with wooden floors and a wall of French windows, letting in plenty of light....
Ripple (repeat)
By Magin LaSov Gregg
On a rusted railroad bridge overlooking Ohio's Rocky River, I stand with my father beneath an ocean blue sky and listen to the water's murmur. My father removes his glasses and points to a large rock beside the lower bank...
Sometimes Life Is Like That
By Jay Wamsted
I saw the sunrise, huge and orange, peeking up over the skyline of Atlanta, dazzling. I had to look away. Bewildered, I swiveled my head right again to the blue sky before looking straight ahead into a roiling mass of dark gray clouds. Water careered about me as I kept inadvertent pace with the storm. ..
How to Envy
By Carmella Guiol
It's important for the bird to see the world, one man tells me, his birdcage propped on the seawall, the sea crashing against the rocks a few feet away. That way the bird doesn’t forget what the sky looks like, what the wind feels like in their crayon-colored feathers...
In-Betweens
Ny Hannah Cauthen
A tiny green lizard clings to a brick outside the window. It takes in the late-morning light, attempting to combat the smooth chill in the air. I watch people filtering in and out of the restaurant wearing sweaters too thick for early September in Georgia...
Pigeon Prayer
By Erica Meurk
And then, as if called to midday prayer, they swoop as one into the air, their shadows littering the square below like paper napkins in a swift wind. Once around, twice around, bunching and spreading and bunching again as they fly.
Paris Street; Rainy Day
By Rachel Anne Murphy
This is the painting that would have greeted us, at the top of the stairs, just inside the gallery doors, centered on its own freestanding wall, seven feet by nine feet, we couldn’t have missed it, if I had said, yes, when he asked, would I like to go with him, to the Art Institute, that weekend, or the next?, instead of looking down at his classroom floor and saying, um, no...
Lick Creek
By Sarah Marty-Schlipf
A breeze tousles the cottonwoods, sending down fine white seed tufts like snowfall in early summer. Minnows gather and part at her pink sneakers. Charli is still, hands cupped at the surface, waiting.
Soft Spot
By Lynne Nugent
Everyone talks about the sweetness of expecting a baby, but less about the terror at having created something so vulnerable. I spent each of my prenatal appointments barely breathing until the moment they swirled the Doppler through cold gel on my belly and relocated that rhythmic swishing...
Signs
By Holly Willis
In the late afternoon, as my mother breathed her way toward her last breath, a deer stepped from the edge of the woods into the coppery light and stood tall, fixing us with a direct gaze from across the field. Waiting for death, I yearned for a signal, a sign, a way to sort figure from ground...
Did You Notice Me?
By Aaron Newman
When I was twelve or so, I shared a poem with Aunt B that I was to read at the public library later that evening. It was called “Summer Skies and Her Silver Eyes,” but she read it as “Summer Skis.” When I corrected her, she laughed first, then continued, line by line, with enough care to make me blush.
Mentor of Cool
By Richard LeBlond
There were Beatniks and wannabes like me in 1959 Portland coffeehouses. We sipped espressos and listened to cool jazz, whatever that was. Too young and inexperienced to distinguish authentic from pretentious, I tried, impossibly, to be cool.
The Lesson
By Jessica Jacobs
Only after the starter gun's snap, did my father burst from the port-a-potty. Only after the other triathletes had raced across the sand and high-stepped it through the shallows like a flamboyance of flamingos in wetsuits, did he run, a streamer of toilet paper flapping from his heel, a crowd of funny guys shouting, "You can catch 'em, buddy!" as he waved to my sister and me in the stands...
Grateful
By Sarah Beth Childers
Often, Grandad descends into a wasteland of words, connecting blessings, family, country, and company with “help to help to help,” but sometimes, he gets stuck on his thankfulness. One night, he bowed his head over the pot roast and said only, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
Filling Cupboards
By Danielle Madsen
When the first mug cracked, you thought it wouldn’t matter, but then they started to shatter. You end up, somehow, in battles over alimony and the kids’ college funds and that broken-down crockpot, and you forget to put your coffee cups into the divorce proceedings. When it’s finally over, you’re both too bitter, too broken, to give each other anything–even a worthless old mug. So they all get thrown in the trash.
Essay for My Five-Year-Old Daughter
By Michael Torres
You wanted me to find you. So I interrogated the avocado tree, searched behind the broken Virgin Mary statue. Finally, I asked the sky for help. Your giggling betrayed you.
River
By Luba Feigenberg
I breathe in, feeling the air fill my lungs. Here I am reminded that leaving the warmth of my bed is worth it. Here I feel the possibility of the day with its new energies, new mysteries, new discoveries. The view offers a fresh start with countless opportunities to begin again. I blink, my eyes like the shutters of a camera, snapping the image to my mind. Inhaling deeply, I pick up the pace...
Metaphor Lesson
By Robert Hardy
There are three girls in Poetry Club. Tra’niyah, the third grader, walks around the classroom looking at everything through a magnifying glass—the leaves of the plants, the point of her pencil, her fingerprints—remarking on how different everything looks...
Eavesdropping in Arizona
By Jason Bruner
"And," he continues, “don’t forget there were the Mongols and” he shakes his head, sighs a smile, “and...” he trails off. I smell their voices weaving with the silver smoke, from the altar up to the golden throne of God. Qadisha...
Night Song
By Wendy Fontaine
My corner of the world is finally quiet - no cars, trains or helicopters; no neighbors clanging soup pots or shouting into cell phones. My daughter, too, is asleep in her bed, limbs spread like compass points. In this stillness, I go inward, listening for the small voice that exists after everything else has been stripped away...
The Museum of Broken Relationships
By Jonathan Starke
There’s this letter on the wall in there that a young boy writes to a young girl during the Bosnian War. They meet at gunpoint, marching toward a van that will drive them to a war camp. The girl doesn’t know the boy loves her...
Here’s What Happens (repeat)
By Catherine Klatzker
You admit it’s not death that makes you shrivel into yourself and brings up those old whimpering voices pleading for safety; it’s dread of that conversation, of giving permission to one’s life partner to take that journey alone, without you.
Holy, Holy, Holy
By Margaret Renkl
An irreplaceable life had winked out in an instant, but outside my window the world was flaring up in celebration. Someone was hearing, “It’s benign.” Someone was saying, “It’s a boy.” Someone was throwing out her arms and crying, “Thank you! Thank you! Oh, thank you!”
Akathisia
By Rijn Collins
There hadn’t been many other teenagers on the ward. I’d watched the obsessive-compulsives, addicts and anorexics, admired the rainbow of pills in my palm, and listened to the speech slur from my mouth, thinking, I am not one of you.
But I was.
So was he.
And there you go.
Reincarnation
By Kathryn Stinson
A radio interviewer asks an aging mystic, “What will you miss the most when you leave this world?” My mind replies silently, sunlight on moving water, and fills with images: afternoon light glancing off the lake, morning sun on ocean tidepools...
Suspension
By Erin Ruble
Retrieving our boat, we pass into the rose-storm of sunset, startling a pair of loons. For twenty million years these birds have lived here. Over my children’s heads I watch this pair sound their tremulous cries, resurrecting their ancestors—as do we, in our melancholy and joy...
Two Degrees
By Alan Rossman
I can still feel the insignificance of those two degrees sloughing off the shoulders of my teenage indifference. For despite all his lectures, Mr. Mitchell never taught us the meaning of two degrees. He never let us feel how those two extra degrees could warm your face and kindle your heart or loosen the rust that had been building around your joints all winter long.
Dinner Talk
By Edvige Giunta
The asparagus grew in the Sicilian garden, and my mother made frittata that was sometimes lunch, sometimes dinner, sometimes snack. Food ran like a thread through our days, and it was orderly and good...
This Is It
By Natalie Tomlin
We stole it at night, one of us running across a lawn we had scoped out beforehand. With a firm kick, I popped it out neatly and ran away with it under my arm like a football, never really breaking my stride. The runaway car was there, waiting...
Shame and Drum
By
In the Midwestern auditorium, a tired Richard Ford reads a fiction about Grand Central Station to a ticketed crowd as tired and sparse as his scalp. He is old and disappointed, and he is reading about old disappointment...
What Matters
By Isaac Yuen
People post sticky notes on what they think it is:
Kirk's ego
Cthulhu Slime
MOM'S MEATLOAF
oblivion...
Kinetic Energy
By Sam Brighton
I loved her with all the kinetic energy rocketing up from this ruckus. We rumbled the tectonic plates below our feet, no doubt, but they held us, all of us together...
Saturday Night
By Don Dussault
Every Saturday evening I put on my best jacket and roll out to my car and fold the wheelchair and place it on the backseat and get behind the wheel and the hand controls and drive five miles out of my small town to the dance hall on the lake. When I roll up to the front double doors and pull out my billfold, the cashier won't let me pay...
Bottle Memories
By Stephanie Eardley
Like a mother waiting for the reassuring cry of her newborn, I pine for the pop of jars sealing. Like apples to apple pie filling I have gone from intimidated tomboy to homemaker...
A Dress for the Wedding
By Lisa Romeo
The bride, it turns out, is a large woman. The bride, in her floaty white dress, and you, in your drapey black-and-white dress, are only one size: the size of love. Your husband says, "Let's dance." On the dance floor, you twirl...
The Boarding School Letters
By Ah-reum Han
But consider for example the six-year-old daughter, face down on her new dorm bed, who cannot possibly imagine what to write to her mother a thousand miles away. What she remembers: departure, leaving their house like thieves, by moonlight, so they wouldn’t miss the first ferry or the first day of school. Dear Mama, she begins...
Paradise Lost
By Angie Crea O'Neal
“What if it’s just sleeping,” I muse, “like Jacob on his pillow of stones?”
But she’s nine now and knows...
Holding Hands
By Stephanie Dethlefs
She lifts the pencil to her tongue, wets it, and answers 34-Down before noticing us and smiling softly. She presses her hands into the armrests and rises to greet us, placing her small, soft palms on each of our cheeks...
Dead Man Tim
By Cheryl Lynn Smith
Tim’s apartment was cleaned and all his belongings put out on a curb in the parking lot. This is the saddest part. Seeing a life in a parking lot...
Yes, They’ve Met
By Jolene McIlwain
When I smile, my son says, “What?” But, I can’t explain. It’s simply something I know...
Seattle, After the Rain
By Anna Vodicka
To the birds, we must look like ants at a picnic, the way we crawl from our dark caves and run crazed for sidewalks and grassy parks, which hours ago sat empty...
This is Where You’ll Find Me
By Jenny Lara
You’s two look like a coupla happy birds says the jackhammer man, all lit up in sparks and a midnight streetside spotlight and the Bronx turns his birds into boyds...
Lines of Light
By Clara Mae Barnhart
When I was a child I liked to squint at street lamps at night because it makes them look like eight-pointed stars. We walked around late in our little village. In the summer we would dodge the toads on the sidewalk in the soft copper glow. Our cat would follow us everywhere...
What We Did with the Honey
By Julia Shipley
They'd stung him all summer: his face, his ankle, his arm, but never me, though sometimes they veered for my curtain of hair...
Morning (repeat)
By Michelle Webster-Hein
When my infant daughter wakes at two in the morning and her father cannot coax her back to sleep, she and I curl up on the mattress in the guest room below the big window, and I drift off with her tiny fingers gripping my thumb...
The Day to Day
By Jessica Terson
Sifting the flour. Squeezing the lever once. And then waiting. For a moment, it is winter again. I take my finger and make snow angels in the little blue bowl. ...
Holding
By Kathryn Wilder (repost of 09/29/14)
My sister and I live on either side of sixty. We've been mothers half our lives. Visiting her in Oregon, Ashland running a steady hundred degrees for days into weeks, we head to Lake of the Woods for the coolness of lake water and wind in the pines. Winding up the mountainside and back through our lives, our four children are never far from our conversation, like our own childhood—childhood, singular, as we shared it, for better or worse, till death do we part...
Turkey Soup
By Marissa Landrigan (repost from 12/01/14)
On Thanksgiving, after the turkey is carved and gutted – after we slice through half of the twenty-pound bird my mother insists on ordering, though there are only ever seven of us for dinner – my father and grandfather return to the half-spent carcass and harvest the rest...
Birthday Cards
by Jia Lim
Once, I skulked into her darkened bedroom, and hid the card for her forty-sixth under her wallet. I was too antsy, announced my fatigue too loudly, and retired for bed too early...
An Absence of Yellow
by Lisa Laughlin
But today I have an hour, and can help them harvest their small backyard lot. I bend more easily than my grandpa to twist a cucumber from its prickly lair...
In the Fold
by Ariana Brocious
Puppeting her hands into the rounded corners, swiftly finding the points. She deftly converted scrunches and wrinkles to smooth lines, the whole thing a neat, soft rectangle in moments...
Bare, Naked
by Andrea Fisk Rotterman
She hands me a filmy gray scarf with silver sparkles. She directs me. Drape and tuck the scarf around your waist. Breathe from the bottom of your lungs...
When Students Cry
by Kate Michaelson
I didn’t have to ask what she meant, but encouraged her that the more she read, the easier it would become. Some days she was so tired she cried...
Mars and a Reflection of Mars
by Carolee Bennett
It’s Night One of this backpacking trip, and I’m an amateur, clumsy at everything, even walking. But right now, we are the only humans on the peninsula at Pharaoh Lake...
Don Isidro
by Diane de Anda
Don Isidro stood at the front door, gunny sack in hand. His hair fell in twisted grey strands just above his shoulders, his beard patchy and uneven across the flushed skin on his face, his nose redder, with purple lines snaked across it...
Brake Lights
by James M. Chesbro
This woman still moves in the paper route of my mind. I see her when I’m loading the car with my bag and my son’s mini-cooler for daycare...
Lightening Up
by Laurie Granieri
Hope and defiance loiter beneath the stars, we'll take our chances, because have you ever felt your own body fling itself into grace?...
Candy Thief
by
At a distance, I watch as he grabs candy bars off the shelf and slides them inside his coat, so absorbed in the act of stealing, he doesn't notice me approach...
Art Lesson
by Joanne M. Lozar Glenn
Every teacher had the same projects. Fall: iron leaves between waxed paper. Winter: chalk snow scenes on black construction paper. Spring: draw daffodils...
Apparent Magnitude: Negative 28, Brighter Than the Sun
by Tricia Theis
I say I love the idea. I think how heartbreaking and sublime, to be the mother of an astronaut...
All Our Travels
by Paul Crenshaw
Small world, we say, when we uncover these coincidences, but what we really mean is that we feel small in it, struggling to find some connection through age or geography...
On the Last Day of Our Friendship
by Megan Renart
Three months ago, the windows were open and we put on music and laughed. Now the windows are closed and the only sounds are the wind in the trees and grass...
Graffiti the Walls
by Matthew Barrett
I want to graffiti the walls where my grandmother lives, white and sterile walls (egg-shell colored walls, as the nurses say), replace her sanitation lists with photographs, magazine spreads, and paper clippings...
All the Tits in the World
by Terrance Manning Jr.
Without me, no welds could pass a real test. I’m like the clean-up guy, the shoe-polisher. I’m the real damn artist....
Ascension Garden
by Stacy Murison
The first time, you drive by yourself. You have some idea you are going there, but are still surprised that you know the way, without her, through the turning and turning driveways...
The Museum of Broken Relationships
by Jonathan Starke
The girl doesn’t know the boy loves her. Some will say the boy doesn’t know what real love is yet. If he does, the war camp will break him of it....
Concrete Hands
by Sara Ackerman
Bits of grit from the stairs stuck to my knees and the marker tip. Branches from the cherry tree, the white-pink petals so papery and particular, threw shadows across the stoop....
Somniloquy
by Michael Levan
Trained by his body to wake now every two hours, he doesn’t much need her voice to tell him it’s time for more meds...
Safety Popcorn
by Sarah Thieman
After all the ruckus there were a few silent hours when no one would be seen or heard. My three older siblings and I hid together in the bedroom my two sisters shared, one of the only two bedrooms in the house...
Growing Season
By Verna Kale
In the two-years-ago garden she sat in the tilled soil and pulled an earthworm taut between two hands and touched it with her tongue....
Sneakers in Sand
By Dina Relles
A deep, irrational sadness swelled at the thought of my son’s sweet shoes sitting at the shoreline as night fell....
My Father’s Only Recipe
By Kim Liao
Marinate for at least two hours, but preferably overnight, or maybe 23 years. He never felt the need to tell his daughter where this recipe came from....
Stay With Me Awhile
By Gina Williams (repost of 08/10/15)
On the day of his visit, I did Helen's makeup, spritzed Chanel No. 5 onto her wrists, and held the mirror while she frosted her lips with Rouge Noir from a gold case...
Waiting for Owls
By Mark Liebenow
Alpenglow colors the white granite peaks a warm crimson. Half Dome, rising a thousand feet above everything else, holds the last golden rays of the sun...
Back Aisles
By Ashley Hutson
Here, a man casually told me he had kidney cancer. A woman wept while revealing her son's autism diagnosis. Teenagers exchanged kisses of clandestine devotion, unaware of Alton Brown's kitchen chemistry near their shoulders....
The Art of the Drought
By Catherine Rankovic
There is this invisible and constant musical theme, the oscillating and haywire sound of locusts...
The Begonia is Blooming
By Danielle Harms
You know the world is full of begonias and yours is unremarkable. But it is remarkable to you, so you rearrange the back seat...
Sewing Notions
By Karen Zey
As a child in the fifties, I didn’t understand that my mother sewed our clothes out of necessity, not as a hobby...
Visitation
On the porch, under a Blood Moon, our fire is dying down, so we wear wool blankets over our shoulders. We’re drinking cider warmed in a pan on the stove, splashed into mugs with whiskey. This cold is still new, still exhilarating; the season is shifting, like the roll of a wave against your body.
The Natural Resonant Frequency of Glass
I dipped my finger in my water glass and ran it evenly around the rim. After a few circles, it started to sing, a fragile ethereal sound, a sound of the soul. My boys, intrigued, dipped their own fingers in their glasses and as each got the hang of it, each glass sang its own note. My husband joined in.
Interruptions
Seek stillness. Close your eyes, relax in the lotus position, and breathe deeply. But hold on tight. Search every corner of the cosmos and you find only a universe in motion. Everywhere bodies and matter interrupt one another. Everywhere stars and planets and forests and cell tissues are born. Everywhere they die.
The Ladder Tree
Hand-built, smoothed gray with age, the stubby ladder rests against the old apple tree, its gnarled bark accepting the still, hopeful embrace of the rails and rungs once climbed by a child when this tree by its stone wall watched over a field of corn...
Linda on the Beach
We don’t know her, the woman who grins and waves as we wander north along Hollywood sand, bedsheets for yoga class billowing in our hands. But maybe, I think, we do know her from somewhere, and it’s not in our nature to be rude, so we wave, too.
Peanut Butter
What was that feeling last night, of chasing a thread of thought from sleep to wakefulness, back into sleep again, not quite sure at any moment whether I was fully awake or fully asleep and only knowing when I got up to use the restroom and perhaps not even then and what was I doing, trying to string some thoughts together...
Here’s What Happens
You admit it’s not death that makes you shrivel into yourself and brings up those old whimpering voices pleading for safety; it’s dread of that conversation, of giving permission to one’s life partner to take that journey alone, without you.
In Perilous Times
The Frank Lloyd Wright calendar hangs askew on your cubicle wall, the citrus skylights of July turning right angles into August in an attempt to create unity on a Tuesday morning when you’re wearing stripes and your socks don’t match.
Something Sweet
The sugar maple stands on a ridge alongside the old tobacco barn. Dark green leaves, the undersides the color of luna moth wings, waggle in a cross wind.
For the Birds
Birds keep getting lost in my living room. It’s my fault, for leaving the doors open. For answering the knock of valley wind so strong it rips posters off the walls, comes pounding, shaking our wood-framed house with big fists, demanding to be let in.
Cold
On the hottest days in San Vicente, I sit on the front porch of my host family’s house, sweat dripping from under my arms, dust turning to mud on my salt-streaked legs. I watch the heat shimmer up from the dirt road, dissolving into blue sky. On these days, I long for snow, hunger after the numbing cold of January in Minnesota.
Resting Place
When he was younger, just born, fear overtook me in waves. I could lose him at any time. I could lose him because I had him, and anything I had, I could lose. The logic was airtight, suffocating.
Resting Place
by Kate Levin
When we arrive at daycare, I step out of the car and close my door gently, hoping not to startle my son awake. As I open the back door to retrieve him from his car seat, I see the bird ...
Hawk
Alone, I stare down the wide notch behind my house where the mountain to the east rolls inward to the west, and the western mountain rolls inward to the east till at last the two converge. A thousand feet below, a ground fog grays the Piedmont, but the sun has risen quite high and the thermals bend the spring-green hardwoods. These are worn mountains, the last mounds of the Southern Appalachians.
Dress Up
We were having drinks at a friend's house when my two-year-old entered the room, pantless, sans diaper. Whenever his older sister and her friends played dress up, he'd get silly and play dress down. But this time he was red-faced and crying. I excused myself, brought him to the other room.
August Garden
My August garden has changed overnight, like a middle-aged woman looking into a mirror, asking, When did that happen, or how did this happen so soon? The cornstalks stand shoulder-to-shoulder, answer in sibilants, and that answer is enough.
Leaving Our Mark
In the weeks before we end our active service in the Marine Corps my roommate, Caleb, and I slug Wild Turkey in our barracks room, and then decide to celebrate our impending freedom by burning down the thirty-foot-high diving platform a mile away off Christianitos Road.
The Killer Bee
My dad took me to pick it up in an empty school parking lot, at night, like a drug deal.
Stay With Me Awhile
They hadn't seen one another since her diagnosis. Pete was her last boyfriend and because she was terminal, would always be the final man in her life, the only remaining thread of sexuality, desire.
The Smell of Old Books
There was a row of shops where the flyovers now swirl and swoop. The shops were cubes of tin and plywood on a strip of pavement in heaving, humid Calcutta. They stood under gulmohar trees; fire-red petals with shade as cool as coconut water.
House Call
Tom lived just five minutes away from my house, and his wife said his legs were so swollen that it would require a 911 call to get him to my office. This was the only house call I’ve ever made.
White
We no longer remember the sound of birdsong or the feel of dry pavement beneath our feet, but we walk to school anyway because school is the place we're meant to walk to on Tuesday mornings. Temperatures register -23 below zero if you don’t count the wind chill, and I always count the wind chill.
Trash Collection Day
From my quiet perch, I would marvel at how effortlessly the men would grab hold of a bin and swing it forward, dumping the entire contents of a week’s worth of trash over the metal ledge and out of sight, then drop the empty can back onto the tired grass.
What I Made
I want to be a man who pays each bill the day it arrives. I want to be a man who knows the precise location of every object in his backpack. I want to be a man who knows about carpentry.
October Moon on Lake
For all that, gentle reader, behold these two loons that paddle so close along the riffled band of light, which the moon has deftly laid on the nervous water by the shore, where leaves titter above me. The birds’ calls are plaintive, an adjective so precise it needs no iteration.
His Pockets
At four he is an earnest collector. He keeps his secrets in his pockets and leaves them for me in the laundry basket. As I unroll the cuffs of his too-long-yet pants, sand dribbles out, a clump of mud caking the cloth. Even if all is quiet, I remain cautious.
Summer Night
On warm August nights, I take out my contacts and go outside, find a spot to lie down, and look up through the basket of live oak branches.
Inheritance
In his 70s, dad bought a gas-powered log splitter and would perch on a stump for hours, loading one log after another, pulling the lever to engage the iron wedge, which descended with a crushing force to split the logs. He recruited his young grandsons to help and they ran back and forth, to stack the wood in orderly rows in the mossy roofed shed in the meadow.
Taking an Art Class
We are given a project to do. Here are the parameters. Lines parallel. Lines perpendicular. Clear relationships. Mass, plane, line. No diagonals. I put the safety glasses on. I cut the wood.
Tiny Purple Flowers
My mother stands at the grocery store counter. Tiny purple flowers rest tucked behind her ear. They have wilted as we walked through the aisles, comparing prices per ounce and coupons to sales. Now, the flower petals are withered balls of lint.
Road Warrior
Someday, the newspaper photographer told me as we drove back from the fire, he was going to do a photo essay on all those raptors along the highway.
First Walk
We are deep in the woods standing at the top of a ridge, surrounded by leafless, lifeless trees, as the last dull light fades into charcoal gray. Bracing for the momentous roar of the next gust of wind, it whips and ruffles the tops of the pines below, then blasts up the ridge in waves of long, slow moans at forty miles an hour
A Walk on Wooded Isle
Starlings and sparrows darted from ground to bush and back again, but one little bird, so like a titmouse in size and color but uncrested, remained perched on a yellowed remnant of last summer's weeds. I was entranced by this slate-colored creature I could not name.
Fearless Eye
I sat on the plank deck of a house in the forest and shared my watercolors and brushes with my nine-year-old nephew. I painted the chestnut-colored ponderosa pines with their puzzle-piece bark. I painted the blue morning sky and white clouds.