Issue 8

Fiction / Agatha Attridge

Jennifer

I roll the question over in my head again and again, time and again, time after time, but questions roll differently in the shape of this head than they did when I was Allie, and how many bubbles has it been since I was Allie?

Nonfiction / Angela Townsend

Unmarked Car

I was Jesus Freak and Jezebel sharing the same wheel. I was the weirdest sister in town...

Poetry / Bill Hollands

The Sun

...and didn’t this go on for years

like the sun would linger

just above the horizon...

Fiction / Laton Carter

Emily Dickinson at Home Depot

I’m talking with my mouth shut, holding a vice, the way responsible people do. Can you see the invisible structures?

Nonfiction / Abdulbasit Oluwanishola

Unwinding

...if it is not an accident, then it is fire, or water, another water case, and again, flood.

Poetry / Julie Allyn Johnson

Indelicate Flower

...our little rose turns her head, then fades away...

Nonfiction / Brian Watson

Privacy

I slowly rewound my scarf before backing out into the stairway. Another emotion arose as I walked back to my entry: relief.

Fiction / Kas Schroeder

Calling Destiny

“And then you try to revisit it, right? That memory. And it gets blurrier and blurrier every single time. ‘Til you can’t even make out the faces or the names of things..."

Poetry / Joanna Cleary

Pussy Poem

I have a problem: I don’t feel sexy when I shave and I don’t feel sexy when I don’t.

Nonfiction / L. Acadia

Crunchy

Watching peanuts slowly churn in the plexiglass vat, then snaking out in two thick ribbons, was meditative...

Fiction / Jaime deBlanc-Knowles

The Conjurer

...everything that happened afterward had the feel of inevitability.

Poetry / Susan Shea

Recipe

...their endless supply of surrender

to the greater good...

Nonfiction / Mostafa El-Kalliny

Onizuka Street

I get the sense that she’s desperate to feel for herself the same degree of freedom as there is in the tune that she’s creating.

Poetry / Satya Dash

Sweet Tooth

Oranges can have

other uses too— like Vitamin C, like juice at breakfast,

like the piquant taste of something nostalgic, like a prop...

Fiction / Mary Ann McGuigan

Rites of Passage

...Like when you shake yourself out of a daydream to find a car coming at you, or glance toward the shore after you’ve gone out too far and the tide is pulling against you. That’s the feeling. But it's more than a flash of terror; it’s a way of life.

Nonfiction / Delia Lloyd

Making Friends in Adulthood: Why We Never Leave Seventh Grade

I never spoke up, though. I, too, had reverted to my seventh-grade self. When you’re new to a crowd, you don’t want to seem like a high-minded, holier-than-thou prick...

Poetry / Serena Rodriguez

Growth Charts

We don’t expect time to lapse

with soap scrubs reaching beyond the elbow, under nail beds

scrubbing our lifelines

down to broken...

Fiction / Sallie Reynolds

The Cave

I’d crawled in the dark, along the floor, into a crevice, crawling because I couldn’t bear not to, pushing, clawing, the tunnel getting smaller and smaller instead of opening, until at last I couldn’t move at all, trapped there in my head...

Nonfiction / Alina Zollfrank

The Great Mow

Round verbs clash with square pronouns. Roles befuddle fluency...

Fiction / Wally Rudolph

Honeycomb

"Hate to tell you: your best is right now. Your best was gone yesterday. Your best is wherever you’re at."

Poetry / Dan Alter

[With the Invisibility They Gave Me]

Or was my soul rotating

slowly like the hot dogs on steel rollers day & night?

Fiction / Hugh Behm-Steinberg

Oscar

He looks so much like me, worried about all the results, looping and looping, but he isn’t any more me than myself...

Nonfiction / Jim Gilkeson

The Eleven Directions of Kansas

That story confused me for a while. It meant that Wichita both was and wasn’t the Center of the World...