Goodnight Lyric
by Kristina Marie Darling issue 67 A clasped hand is rarely safe, especially in the spring. That day everything in Rome was burning: the chapel,the little school in Trastevere, and the restaurant, with its ostentatious display of carved ice. Now the longgoodbye, the final exchange of gifts. Because theirnarrative is not specific to a particular year, it […]
Homecoming (Langenthal)
by Daniele Pantano issue 71 The afternoon bell peals the children out of school. They say it’s great to see you after all these years. You can’t look at them. But you believe them. The missing parents are wading through the rust. You can’t make yourself believe in the end of winter. Back in the […]
Lineage
by Layla Al-Bedawi issue 67 On Monday I don’t even go inside. I circle the house twice, looking for clues about what is expected of me, how I might help. Finally the only thing I can think to do is drive down to the nursery, buy a bag of tulip bulbs and a shovel, and […]
Foreign Bodies
by Gulchin A. Ergun issue 67 It’s the end of a busy weekend, but I’m the gastroenterologist covering seven doctors, so hectic is what I expect. Sixty rings and beeps, fifty-three follow-ups, and twelve new consults claimed my attention in the past fifty-one hours. So it is 8:00 p.m. on Sunday, and I leave the […]
You and Your Middle-Aged Cat
by Meg Pokrass issue 69 WHEN YOU RETURN TO UMA’S HOUSE, she and a girlfriend are drinking wine, cooing over a brochure of eye makeup shades. Uma’s girlfriend looks at you as if something is amiss. “You look cute today,” she says, slicing her eyes up at you. “Is that a new shade of lipstick?” […]
A Tomb Dug Under Mother
by Dustin M. Hoffman issue 69 Above your bed where you lie belly up, Hector’s mom rattles around in the kitchen. She’s home like a haunting. She must’ve forgotten her midnight lunch at work. This woman, your unwilling adopter, lives her life reversed, nocturnal, a living-dead working stiff. You close your eyes and imagine her […]
Hostitality
by Nola Propst issue 69 Thinking of South Carolina summers I think of the sensation of biting into a rotten apple. I think of the way in which my teeth sink into an elastic skin and through to a pulpous body, then the taste of decay. And No matter how vigorously I scrape my tongue […]
The Satchel
by Shawn Goodman issue 70 This is how it started: I froze in the med line. Call me Lithium Fat. Call me Nicotine Stain and Compulsive Collector of Notebook Ticks. Call me Sleeps in Clothes, Bipolio, Massive Depressive. Call me Joe. The new staff guy checked his clipboard. “Joe,” he called, fingers pushing pills out […]
Helen Frankenthaler, My Mother, and the Properties of Art
by Sarah Van Arsdale issue 70 It was in a cold mid-December that I had the dream. I dreamed I was in a cave. It was surprisingly well-appointed, with Oriental rugs strewn on the ground and benches carved out of the cave walls. Around me, piles of my mother’s things—boxes of her diaries, and letters, […]
How I Lost My Mind
by Emerson Henry issue 71 He was the first lover I’d had who only knew me as Emerson; everyone before him had met me as my former self, a girl unsure of her body and desires. The year before I’d come out as non-binary; now, at the beginning of my senior year of college, I […]