Category: Prose
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Mona Lisa in Bronze
Where had he found rum? I took a sip. It was strong but sweet. Warm from his hands. “In Cuba we have a saying,” he said, “when you drink from my cup, you learn my secrets.” Creative Nonfiction by Dacia Price
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Assisted Living
I couldn’t help believing my mom was dragging me down. I felt like a bad person, thinking a thing like that, but I’d spent the last year bringing her clean underwear in psych wards and convalescent hospitals. She was still young, everyone said. And physically fine. But she wanted to die. It had become my…
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Traumatic Detour
Sometimes, during a lull between murders, I realize we’re due for another. Often, within a day or two of me realizing this, something dreadful occurs: a mass shooting; a bombing; a knifing rampage; a truck accelerating along the sidewalk. When this happens, I feel instantaneous remorse, as if I should have tweeted a warning: “Don’t…
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Elysian Fields
I wake in morning light on my back-porch cot, glad to figure I’ve found my way back in the night, thanking Providence and Zeus and whoever else. In the night I must’ve dreamed about Helen, the older sister of Parke Wright and the only woman I’ve ever truly loved. I’ve got her song on my…
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The Best Light Fades
At Mom’s Place I wore a nametag that said Angel and waited on a group of teenagers. They poured ketchup, mustard, mayo, and watery Coke, into a glass and dared one another to drink it. A couple of guys from the Navy Yard showed up for midnight milkshakes, my landlord among them. He was happy…
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Princess Manor
It felt like a violation to be in Princess Manor alone. It felt like a violation to be a woman there at all, wearing floppy jeans and a wrinkled sweater. Men looked at me as I walked to a booth at the rear, then averted their eyes, like I was a living person in the…
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Dear Editor of Kentucky Journal
Can we recommend a willow switch? Can you hear us in the Iron lungs and sorrow of the State Sanatorium for the feeble minded? Can you hear their ghosts on the sawgrass wind? Prose Poetry by Sean Thomas Dougherty
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Sex Tips For The End Of The World
Fiction by Nicole Beckley For a moment she thinks of her ex-husband, Dan, how crazy they were, how immature. How they’d knocked his bed off the shaky cinderblock frame a few times, climbing on top of each other. How her mother had cried at the sight of her in a wedding dress. “So grown up,”…