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...

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...

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...

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"...

By Hanna Saltzman
His eyes are shimmering lakes of grays and blues, absorbing all that he sees above: chipped paint the color of clouds, an arcing sparrow, summer sunlight dancing the polka on leaves of ivy draped across his sky. His weight pulls him down, while his awe pulls him up.

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...

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...

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...

By Lina Lau
My kids leave artifacts, fragments of themselves for me to find. Crumpled cheese stick wrappers shoved between couch cushions...

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?!...

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.

By Elita Suratman

“Look,” Abah says, his thumb pointing to the pouch taking shape in my sister’s hands. In mine, a tangle of green fronds. Unshaped. Unformed...

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...

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...

By Marian Rogers
In a dream, my mother and I are in a small boat with a mast but no sail. We run aground on a beach—a pastel place, pale sand, rose sky, a faint blue sea behind us.

By Robin Schauffler
Once a jagged, broken chunk of black basalt, then polished for decades or centuries by sand and wind and sea.

By Alyssa Lindley Sinclair C- Section; noun; 1) The lights are on bright, the room freezer-cold and strangers wheel you in on a hospital bed, helpless and naked beneath a thin cotton gown, and they stick a needle in your back and you start shaking, from the drugs,...

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.

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.

By Sari Fordham


"Why can't you be more careful?" I ask my daughter, Kai. She is nine. Wild in her beauty. Her face reflects an ocean of moods–exhilaration, wonder, fury. Now it's awash in regret.

By Jillian McKelvey


We sit on the cement porch, our legs folded over the top step eating seafood in the dark, like lovers.

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.

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.

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...

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...

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...

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.

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...

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.

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

By Wiley Wei-Chiun Ho
I recently framed the first piece of paper where my anglicized name appears. I paid extra for the non-reflective glass, so that viewers can see the details, including the black and white passport photo of my six-year-old self, looking very serious...

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...

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...

By Hanna Saltzman
His eyes are shimmering lakes of grays and blues, absorbing all that he sees above: chipped paint the color of clouds, an arcing sparrow, summer sunlight dancing the polka on leaves of ivy draped across his sky. His weight pulls him down, while his awe pulls him up.

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.  

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

By Alexandra Dane
Fifteen years before, on the terrible day we buried my grandmother’s only daughter, my mother, we leaned against each other sharing family stories. Then she told me one I had never heard: “In a letter from Paris a charcoal drawing just fell out, your mother, nude!”

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

By H.T. Ngo
The combination to my gym locker is 6-22-32. Locker number 433.

To unlock the gate at the club, use 5024. It’s usually already opened by the groundskeeper.

My code for the office copier is 4599.

My credit card number is 4024-0071-3578-1044.

You can have them all.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

By Darien Andreu
My husband raps on the kitchen window from the deck outside where the cat sews in and around his legs. "Can you hand me that thing?" he says, pointing unsteadily. The scar from his brain surgery curves over his left ear...

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...

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...

By Deb Werrlein
At every lesson, she serves me tea. She steeps it with cardamom and swirls of evaporated milk then pours it steaming into “my” cup—a white ceramic blue-flowered mug—and adds a heaping spoonful of sugar.

By Robert Barham
Hunting was a source of food, the main recreation, and a rite of passage. Everyone hunted. Still, I had a choice. It was dusk, and my father and I sat beside a crop field, plowed over in the fall.

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?

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.

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...

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...?

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...

By Laura Rose
My father was orphaned at eighteen, and though he’d made his own family, we weren’t enough to satisfy his craving for deep roots. For that, he had his sixth great-grandfather and the American Revolution...

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...

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..."

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...

By Jehanne Dubrow
Soon the insects would come up from the ground. It said so in the newspaper. After seventeen years—five longer than I had been alive—the cicadas would tunnel upwards from sleep into the hard touch of daylight ...

by Alison Asagra Stoos
I’ve forgotten about the sourdough starter again, bubbling in the warmth of the oven light, the only temperature-controlled environment we have in our apartment ...

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...

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...

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...

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....

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...

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. ...

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. ...

By Michelle Webster-Hein

I’ve recently dedicated myself to learning the names of trees. Before I never thought it made much of a difference, but the beauty of their names compelled me. ...

By Michelle Webster-Hein

Tonight I peeled and chopped carrots for dinner, tossed them with oil and thyme, oven-roasted them. The simpler the ingredient, the more miraculous it seems to me. ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

By Jenny Apostol
“What kind of urn do you have in mind?”
“No need,” I tell the funeral director. “My mother was a potter.”...

By Courtney Hill Gulbro
She was known for being on her own time. Mama was late to her wedding and to just about every event thereafter. Books, birds, an ant trail in the yard—all captured her attention. She was never in a hurry...

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...

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...

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...

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...

By Katie Walsh
When we get home from the hospital, I realize the electrodes are still stuck to my father’s chest and back. He says that it hurt too much when the nurse tried to remove them, so he told her to forget it...

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...

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....

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. ...

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?"

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...

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...

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...

By Desiree Cooper
My parents are old and inert, their bones want only to be still. There’s not much we can do for entertainment, except sit here, and then for a change of scenery, sit there....

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.”...

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....

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....

By Jennifer L. Hollis
The black, four-inch stilettos with pointed toes were a gift, so I tried to be polite as I thought of a kind way to say: Hell no....

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...

By Harmony Hazard
I want to believe that the first song I heard came from my mother. She sang "Moon River" while putting me to bed....

By Claudia Monpere
My beloved friend dying of cancer said she’d been afraid of poetry for too long. I suggested a poetry party....

By Jeff Ewing
My father’s face could accommodate almost any emotion but disappointment. There were times it was called for, certainly, but it just couldn’t get any purchase....

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....

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....

By Kelly Zanotti
Pedro is quiet as we walk, and is still quiet when we stop to rest on a rock where above us pawpaws hang overripe like clean green hearts....

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....

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....

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....

By Erin Wood
After the very worst winter, spring pushes back the smell of antiseptic, the taste of iron, the pain of useless milk, and fills the air with the green aroma of life once more....

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....

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....

By Angie Crea O'Neal
“Because, what if they don’t turn out okay?” The question, posed by my 14-year old daughter, hung in the air as we drove past the park after school late one afternoon.

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. ...

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.

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.

Inside me, I felt a squeezing in my chest. Even as I write this I can feel again that bound-up thumping of my heart, feel the warm still air, the smell of the creaky pews, light casting down through stained glass, all of us in the honey jar of light together.

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.

Years ago, in another state, I watched a car fail to turn with the road. It mounted the sidewalk, spiraled into the air, and, after rolling once or twice, came to rest in a vacant lot. Dust swirled and settled like 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.

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...

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...

By Andrea Marcusa
On the plane home, out the window, all I see is empty sky. As a girl, when talk of dying arose, I always gazed up to where I am now, drifting past the tops of snowy clouds.

But you are nowhere...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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.

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.

In 1976, when you were still alive,
I wrecked my car on 14th Street
in D.C. on our first date.

Gravel dots her fingertips, her knees, the edges of her yellow dress. She runs along the parked RV, the sun hanging low above its roof. She bends and picks up a pebble; it stretches along the small of her hands. Her arm cocks back as she eyes me, smiles.

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.

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...

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...

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...

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...

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.

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.

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

By Madeline Bodin
Our off-the-grid neighbors say that they know when the power has gone out because a chorus of hums rises from the generators in the valley. Now, our house has joined that choir...

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...

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...

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....

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....

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....

By
My first memory is a lie: I am a baby, flying around the living room....

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....

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....

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....

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....

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....

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.

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....

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....

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.

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....

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....

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...

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...

By A. Mauricio Ruiz
This morning I went out to the garden with my mom and picked up guavas, tiny yellow pieces of fruit that had fallen from the tree and now lay scattered on the ground. I bent over and picked them up, one by one, thought of the time when there was only...

By Rachael Button
When I climb, my husband catches me. Peter is younger than me, lankier, quieter. His body weaves up rock with a grace my shaky, short frame cannot yet settle into--but he's learned not to correct or coach me. Instead he holds me on belay...

By Nicole Baute
In September, they carry Ganesha to the river. The bedazzled elephant god sits Sukhasana, mala of flowers around his neck, unlikely to swim. My inherited religion is about a man who rose from the dead, his bloody corpse the symbol...

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.

By Tamara Lang
I nest, my sleeping bag encircling me as I sit, skin-hot down sheltering this present happiness as if it were a round, warm egg. Clouds have erased the peaks beyond the harbor, and I feel the boat that formed my bed tugging at its lines...

By George Such
A memory like a dream without a face....

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....

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....

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...

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. ..

By Sarah Dalton
My memory unfolds, and it is inevitable: the scent of a sweet Navel orange reminds me of my first love. I see his clean, large hands, the prominent lunulas on each nail...

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.”

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.

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...

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...

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...

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!”

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...

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.

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...

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...

By Kelly Miller
I see her hustling with baby and bags of food. So close to stacked bumpers. Cars hurrying toward fast food or fun. People inside who hate their jobs or spouses. People who don’t understand why they’re always angry...