By Bryan Price [] As the interview was winding down, she ran her hand through her hair distractedly and asked if I’d ever met him—Jean Dagault. I said, once, in Ithaca. She asked me what it was like and I said what was what like? Meeting him or what was he like? She said both or…
By Jeanne Bryner “So we move another summer closer to our last summer together—“ –Linda Pastan Your groin’s bruise, purple like mother’s iris. They bloom in June just for your birthday, she lied to the girl I was. The fair’s gone; we can’t be eighteen again. There’s a bell to ring, but no sledge for…
By Katie R McKay I’ve always hated the spring, but it’s the time of year I’m most prone to falling in love. When I think back to that spring, I think about so many things, things like the balmy weather, the day drinking, the rolling nature of the days, one blurring into another in a…
By Sabrina E. Siew we sit opposite each other, a Sunday tradition. the chrysanthemums pushed down in hot water, like the knees of his tar-haired child on American soil. only one teacup quiet on tablecloth, he doesn’t ask for more, but orders my bing seoi before I can speak. here, I am little, the lazy…
By Britt Astrid Alphson There is a viciousness about it, Indio. Bark scorpions and the collapsing of breath, of time, of anything besides a careening sort of heat. The Morongo Casino Resort juts from the soil like some beckoning reptilian creature: the older patrons with their rotting teeth, acres folded upon acres of fuck-you-green putting…
By David Salner Dirt, dust, and mud; gumbo of ground bone; two million femurs in wet earth of the wide and charming Volga; Tibia shards underfoot near the placid Elbe; not to mention cranium bits along the meandering waters of the Vistula; and the tidal Ota, whose sediment is home to delicate wrists, all those…
By Jacob Simmons In less than half a century, man’s view of the universe has been transformed. In less than a year, I’ll be forty. Jesus. Forty years old. When I was in my twenties, I moved to the middle of a blackberry field, into a farmhouse that roasts me like a chicken when Fresno…
by Jeanne Bryner Beside his chair walks a shadow but where’s the candle to lift, to light what patron saint protects him? Our town’s wheelchair man, legs bent and angled, crooked feet shod. Long ago he knew the forge; see leather gloves, fingers cut away? Twice a day he slogs himself to town then back.…
By Daniel Edward Moore but that doesn’t make me the pastoral police. At least, not over the acres of sky known for their fluffy feel-good frenzy. According to the ocean’s cold crashing hymns in the church of drown, no don’t, there’s little time left for the skin to burn like incense in the temple of…