Womb Cat wants to paint her house fluorescent orange. Call it Crisis. Call it citrus combating scurvy. Cat doesn’t go outside much anymore. She orders in her groceries. She doesn’t answer the doorbell, and whenever the mailman walks onto her porch with another...
But here I am anyway, in the CVS on Perkins and Sixteenth, allowing her to turn me criminal. Like this. Don’t be, like, obvious. See? When she slides a lipstick into her palm, it’s so delicate, you’d think she was lifting a bird. At the counter, three Maybelline...
It sounds like you’re always writing! How did you decide what stories to put in this chapbook? Were there any that you took out? I officially started working on Breaking Points in Jonathan Cardew’s Bending Genres workshop when I wrote the first story in this...
Sometimes I need it to be dark. That’s what I need. For it to be dark. I lean out my apartment window and pluck the midday sun like a plum from the sky. I hold it in my chapped palms, consider the swallow: the bob of my throat, the stone in my stomach, but no. I don’t...
You’re standing with toes far back from the edge, not prepared for a swim that night in Otsego when he sneaks up behind and throws you in from the dock, not out, but off to the side where it’s too shallow. You slice both heels on the zebra mussels, squat-swim to the...
Sometimes you think about her hands. Sometimes, before the sun hits the sky, you sit at the kitchen table, crimping empanadas with your brown, bony hands and wonder if hers are soft and thin, as white woman hands should be. Sometimes, when you knead the pasty white...
The creature who lives in the well makes noises at night. Small noises as if it doesn’t want to disturb us. It disturbs me. Right now, everything disturbs me: taking dishes out of the dishwasher, folding laundry, talking with Rebecca. “It could be a frog,”...
My brother is the smallest man in the world. I’m not even kidding. Most of the time, he lives in my jacket pocket. One kernel of popcorn will keep him going for weeks. It’s hot in there, in my jacket pocket, and hard to breathe, probably. But he needs so little air....
They came to town, one riding a lawnmower, the other carrying a leaf blower, their hair shorn tight and crisp like hedges. And their teeth: white, too white, so white they were blue. Flashed those teeth at everyone they passed as they wandered around our town. When...
1st: Place: Party in the O.R. by Lannie Stabile Runner-Up: Through the Window by Susan Wigmore Runner-Up: Be Prepared by JR Walsh Shortlisted Titles and Writers sea hungry by Alvin Park Exotic by Ina Roy-Faderman Spit Joined by Tom Weller Unwound by Tiffany Grimes If...
The pigeon-pea, that lies under seventeen cardboard mattresses, grew in the stone age, amongst wild animals, and traveled across time and continents, and out of a store-bought box, as others poured into a clay pot to simmer as dahl on my fire, for me to feel it now....
We Sleep Within the Vast Sadness of the MountainSalty FeetDark CrescentHow Boys Get Their WingsLairFish FolkMY ANALOGThe Waking SpellHome Remedies Or: A Guide for the AfflictedFusionthe silk farmerNettlesSkin BeetlesGhost SweatIt's Still ThereCold ComfortThe...