I have this dream: We’re back in the church of Santa Margherita de Cerchi. You’ve written a letter to Beatrice Portinari on a receipt for leather shoes—requesting our love last through this life and the next. Me, I don’t pray this way. I go down to the river, which...
●Suit jacket and pants. White shirt. ●Brown knit tie, too narrow, too long. ●Pocket square, folded and stapled into shape. ●Battered Florsheim...
Unsecured in the back seat, I stretched my legs out where my sibling usually sat next to me, preaching about personal space, railing on how much I needed to grow up, give them some room, goddamn it. I’d kicked off my shoes like always, and as the good old country, not...
Myna Chang’s new flash collection, The Potential of Radio and Rain (out now from CutBank Books), is a revelation on the ferocity of human need set against the epic forces of nature. Her sentences snap as fast as a cyclone, whipping misfit characters across a prairie...
“The letter opener?” I said to my husband in the middle of the night. “I panicked,” he said, rolling the letter opener between his fingers by his side as if it would disappear. There was a fire next door, but we lived in a rowhome, so there might as well have been a...
Why not the boy from high school with the red hair and freckled skin? Classmates said he liked you, said he was too shy to ask you out, but you knew that wasn’t true. You knew because he was a Nice Boy, an Above You Boy who was friends with the Jock Boys and the Above...
Avee Chaudhuri: Children at play seems to be of recurring interest in the collection. There are all these powerful and evocative instances and sentiments of children at play, and the chapbook's longest piece is “The Rumpelstiltskin Understudies, (play)” which is about...
Judge, Peter Orner, chose these 20 stories for inclusion in the next anthology! At My Job I Work the Robotic Arms by Kati Fargo Ahern Unfinished Equations by Reneé Bibby Odds and Ends by Brett Biebel The Cloud Lab by Megan Callahan Maid in America by Christine H. Chen...
Step 1: Butter both sides of two pieces of bread. Put mayonnaise on the outside of both. The crows outside caw his arrival from their nest up the light pole. I can tell they’re talking to me because I’ve learned that even crows sound different when they talk to...
-after the paintings, The Baby (1944) and Artist's Daughter by the Sea (1943) by Milton Avery Why I chose to enter the world at a time of such violence and destruction, I will never know. But births always come after deaths; adults seem to forget this. It is only we,...
Dear Ginny, It’s the last night of September. This week, your leaves started to change—darkest green to richest red. Your growth this first year has been miraculous, even for you, my hardy twining vine. I remember planting you in the midnight hours on March 13th...
But now there are only two brothers and one moon. At the end of my seven-day shift, I hang the blue lantern on my remaining brother’s door. His whole family is awake, to welcome me back and crater him with goodbyes, and the children smell like creosote, like they’ve...