“He’s bleeding out!” These words stampede through the air, disembodied from their owner. “Somebody help him!” I stand on the museum steps. When the words reach me, I am unsteadied by their desperate velocity, and I wobble on the bottom step. I hope they have reached...
We went to the museum, but we didn’t see anything good. We sat on a long bench under the great T-Rex, frozen in midroar. Outside, your son wound his way through a fake rainforest, raised pathways running under and over each other. He had darted for the doors as soon...
In the first month of the year after the holiday season she felt out of sorts (the season she got the diagnosis, the season the doctor gave her a referral to the Giant Hospital), Barbara bought things. She awoke every day with the phrase carpe diem on a looping...
In 2023, the island known in County Kerry as the Sleeping Giant, named for its resemblance to a man lying on his back, exhaled. Those first few people to see it were quick to dismiss the notion they must have seen mist rising or a flock of gulls. For, as they...
The giant orb in the night sky makes our friend’s house look like a doll’s house. One of us mentions this and another of us scoffs, “As if.” We clutch sleeping bags in our arms, plain ones without characters. We borrow them from older siblings, or our parents buy them...
My son…he’s a good boy. I hug him as often as I can. Casey is almost five now, but he’s small for his age, so he feels more like a three-year-old. I want to hug him like this forever. I want him to hug me back like this forever – with both arms and legs and all of his...
I’ve been a fan of Constance Malloy’s for quite some time now. I always look forward to her posts on The Burning Hearth, and her memoir Tornado Dreams speaks to trauma and the path to healing with great courage and hope. Her latest book Born of Water: A Hybrid...
This has definitely been one of our hardest contests to decide on a longlist. We had the privilege of reading many fantastic chapbooks over the last few months, and we're sad we can only pick one winner. Here are the titles of the thirty-five that make up our...
When the first of the last coughs come, I take my father to the sea. I know he likes it there. Every time memory resurfaces and reveals his previous life—before my mother, before me, long before the sting of IV lines and the smell of disinfectant—he talks about all...
We were sitting in the stadium waiting for the Face. It came at 6:45, right-center field, or that’s what I’d heard because I hadn’t seen it yet. I was there with my son and one of his friends from the city league—Kierran or Kellan, scrawny kid from the west side....
Look at their body language: Henry grips the wheel with his left hand while the other chops at the air. Marilyn stares out the window. They are driving down a two-lane road charred silver by the summer moon. Without saying their goodbyes, they’ve left a house that...
I was in her backyard, the tiny fenced-in yard behind an extravagant Brooklyn brownstone. I had the baby, Violet, in my arms, and my son, Jasper, was running around with Mateo—both goofy and uncontainable. They were doing the work of four-year-olds—transmuting the...