CREATIVE NONFICTION
Still Awake by Julie Marie Wade
For Margaret Wise Brown In the great green room once known as The Earth, we stretched out in dry grass and stared up at the sky, arms akimbo behind our heads. Elbows for miles. There was a telephone, once…
Read More
Pawn by Starr Davis
I am on the East Side of Columbus, Ohio. One street over from Lev’s Pawn Shop is an abandoned storefront where I met my ex-lover when we were in high school. He cuts hair now in a barbershop on…
Read More
Index of Body Parts by Kim Magowan
Elbow The so-called “funny bone,” the most sensitive bone in the body. A tap here feels excruciating. The hardest point of the body, according to the scary mass email my mother-in-law sends (subject heading: FOR WOMEN!). “If assaulted, attack…
Read More
Hott Lipps by Matthew Clark Davison
“Breaker one-nine, breaker one-nine. This is Hott Lipps. Anybody out there?” I release the button, light a cigarette, take a drag, then exhale. Today, no E., and almost nothing but static on the CB radio. The space heater tries, but…
Read More
This Shattering by Wiam El-Tamami
just before dawn I. It started in the daytime, my sister says, I remember the light. We were watching TV. Mama and Baba were in their room, asleep. We heard noises that sounded like fireworks. It happened at…
Read More
“When Doves Cry” by Anne Panning
Prince tipped extravagantly. He’d leave $100 bills tucked under the ketchup. He did not condescend, but would wiggle his little fanny all the way out the door. The limos gobbled him up and deposited him at Paisley Park. Lavender…
Read More
How We Carry the Weight of It by Will McMillan
We arrive in the raspberry fields when it’s dark. It’s dark when we pile out of our secondhand pickup. My father, my mother. My brother and me. It’s dark when we start walking the rutted, sopping dirt road that…
Read More
For Rent by Rosa Kwon Easton
You fluff the white rice for lunch. Aroma of fermented soybean paste stew wafts in the air. Gazing out the open window, you tense. You slap the rice paddle on the counter and rush outside, charging headfirst across the…
Read More
Gordon Bishop by Naomi Melati Bishop
Gordon Bishop, fifty-six, is a one-eyed, one-legged, one-breasted single father. He is a native New Yorker who shares an antique-filled one-bedroom apartment in Hell’s Kitchen with his teenage daughter. Every night, Gordon sits at his desk wearing tighty-whities and…
Read More
Split Ends by Rowan McCandless
When my mother died, I inherited a sizeable goldenrod-coloured envelope; inside, I discovered birthday cards given to me from family members throughout my childhood, handmade get-well cards crafted by classmates upon the occasion of having one of several surgeries…
Read More