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...

Photo Story: Arcana

By Robert Keal
Each card foretells a fresh doom. She lays them side by side, three perfect slabs, her bridge towards the truth.

Jigsaw Puzzle

By Roberta Beary
When someone said, I saw your husband eating out with another woman, he said she’s a colleague and I believed him...

Foreign Countries

By Emily Farranto
When we fell in love, my future husband wrote: Being with you feels like being in a foreign country.

Lullaby for Mariupol

By Stephen Connacher
I remember the chilly winter carnivals at Drama Theater, and the new green and yellow maternity hospital. Neighborhood babushkas gossip among the falling leaves.