Featured Articles

Inheritance

By Keith J. Powell
I think of my father taking me to see Batman opening night. Teaching me poker at the cabin.

Clutch

By Mikki Aronoff
The way I remember it, your dad was dying, not mine, his purple-blotched feet peeking out the edge of the hospice bed, its cold rails raised against a fall.

Photo Story: Taco Truck

By Linda Grierson-Irish
Dad’s latest between-jobs hobby was circling ads with orange highlighter. Imagine, love! An RV! Airstream? Converted bus?

Photo Story: On Autoimmune Disease

By Lauren Voeltz
I read a quote that an overweight woman’s shirt said Guess, and Arnold Schwartzenegger answered, thyroid problem and I think of this when I pop Levothyroxine each morning...

My Lithuanian Holocaust Survivor Grandmother—

By Tamara MC
BEFORE: Hot water burbled in samovars. You strolled cobblestone streets, clicking your heels. DURING: You sipped grass soup.

Freckle Inventory

By Anslee Wolfe
Freckles scatter across his face, neck, arms. They hide beneath clothing. A large one dots his ear. Five pepper his cheek.

When your son, who hates everything, who even hates playing sports,

By Amy R. Martin
... asks to play Ultimate Frisbee, you drive him—begrudgingly—to practice. The field is green, squelchy from morning rain. The sky like a Dutch cloud painting.

Photo Story: The Red Shoes

By Karen Crawford
None of the passengers notice his glare. The lock in his gait, the crush of shoulders, hemming you in.

Coffee Drinks

By Cynthia Belmonto
Twenty-two, I was with my first lover, not college-girl exploring but the real deal.

Over Easy

By Erin Dzida
“You go first, I’m still deciding,” I said as the waitress shifted her gaze, working her way around the table.

Book Review: The House of Grana Padano

By Celia Bland
In The House of Grana Padano, the collaboration between Meg Pokrass and Jeff Friedman blends rhythms and styles seamlessly. These two masters of the microfiction form generate a dialectic that plays within the rigorous requirements of their chosen genre.

Photo Story: The Other Side

By India Kea
She arrived with clenched fists, wide eyes, and strong lungs. During the cleaning, the elders caught her stretching her neck, peering into the darkness of a near past.

Unused Magic

By Maureen McEly
There are wishes in my hair, constellations of fluff from dandelion ghosts my daughter blows in my direction.

Settling Into The Rest Home for Ragged Girls

By Anika Carpenter
The island’s breakers rattle windows. Filthy storm clouds snigger, ‘“the jetty is as brittle as your bones.”

I Wish I Could Tell My Dead Husband

By Jamy Bond
That I stole his Percocet stash and then helped him look for it. That I found his suicide note tucked inside his dog-eared copy of Infinite Jest.

In the Psychiatric Emergency Room

By Yu Li
You make up reasons for skipping pills. You must lie because the robins are watching, rolling both paranoid eyeballs, their jaundiced bellies bulging...

I Lived

By Emily O. Gravett
It was the summer of Shakira songs. We danced in clubs all over downtown Jerusalem until 4 a.m. and studied biblical Hebrew for six hours in the daytime.

Common Ground

By Sara Siddiqui Chansarkar
My name is Sara, I say. I’m from India. Never met an Indian with that name, they say. Is it short for something? No, that’s my first name. I say.

It’s Better This Way

By AJ Atwater
The convertible black as night with straight-up fins and a grille like shark’s teeth comes to rest in the bar’s parking lot among long-bed pickups with pipes and lumber and paint-splattered extension ladders...