CREATIVE NONFICTION
“Pretend We’re Dead” by Melissa Ragsly
My first job was at a farmstand with a twenty-five-foot papier-mâché witch named Winnie towering over the parking lot. Eyes like a lizard’s with vaginal slit pupils and a boulder of a nose. She enchanted people. Drivers would pull…
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Little Boy Ghost by Ira Sukrungruang
Since we’ve moved to England for the year, my son Bodhi fears being alone. He can’t verbalize what it is he fears. Everywhere we go he follows, hand linked into an arm or fingers pinching the fabric of a…
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Walking the Iowa River with My Grandmother after the Floods by Grace Morse
I told you it wouldn’t take long to get to the river. No, I don’t come here alone at night. Yes, I do come here when night is impatiently waiting to arrive, streaking the sky with pink and cobalt…
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Orchid, Excerpt from Orchid: A Memoir by Chaya Bhuvaneswar
“Today I believe in the possibility of love; that is why I endeavor to trace its imperfections, its perversions.” ―Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks Chapter One: Orchid Tattoo 1. …granulation tissue Granulation tissue is cell growth, after…
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Bus Stop by Gabe Montesanti
The nurse processing my intake at the psychiatric hospital looked like the kind of person with whom I would strike up a conversation while waiting for a drag show. Everything about her seemed to match, down to the color…
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Twelve by Elissa Lash
One Once there was a hungry woman. Some said she was a giant and some said she was a witch. That woman is me. She might be you. I’ve always been voraciously hungry. Even before the years I starved…
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Excerpts from The Space Between by Herb Harris
Prologue I must begin by telling you that I am Black. This is a very strange thing to have to say out loud. It is usually something self-evident that goes without saying. But my light skin and blur of…
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Racing, Excerpt from My Heart Is a Bomb by Tori Malcangio
Here they are, the two men in my life who have stepped forward in an executioner’s line. We’ll take the shot, they’re saying, as they assume positions in twin chairs stationed in every cardiologist’s office we’ve visited since my…
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Archipelagic by Elisabeth Vasquez Hein
Is your mom a mail-order bride? I was once asked by a classmate in fourth grade while we sat at our desks making fake nails out of Elmer’s glue squeezed into the hollow of our plastic rulers. No, of…
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Canines by Jona Whipple
She says go like this and bares her teeth at me, lips pulled back. All the other girls lean in to see inside my mouth, too close. I smell the leather of their shoes, but I don’t flinch. Jagged,…
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