I hear my children in the backseat, reading the numbers and letters out loud, recognizing whether the car we can’t stop watching belongs to their father.
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Touch Me, Baby by Joe Bonomo
Shuffling through a box of old 45s is like letting fistfuls of soil leak through your fingers. Organic matter, minerals, microbes all seem present on vinyl and worn labels, the grooves veritable garden rows. Heft, ballast, stuff in my hands.
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Selections from Babyland By Hadara Bar-Nadav
The walls at the infertility clinic are lined with babyheads. Thousands and thousands of babyheads.
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IN THE SHADOW OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM By Kayo Chang Black
When I was 18, I crashed my car for the third time. My mother shook her head and said, “I should have listened to the fortune teller. He did tell me not to let you drive."
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Contagion by Mary Mandeville
Before, we knew where he was. This time, birth mom also had no idea; he’d run away from us all.
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High Mom by Danielle Privitera
When my son is old enough, he won’t care, because it saved our family.
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Cannibal by Jennifer Sinor
I am eating myself, slowly, from the outside in. Salted skin and blood.
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Shock, Honey by Megan Goss
Mother tries to talk, to reassure her eighteen-month-old daughter, but she can’t get her voice loud enough. Baby’s wails keep cutting out.
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Siento By Sarah Capdeville
I forgot, when it came down to it, that I existed.
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1989 by Lee Ware
My mother always says: I wish you would have known your father before the accident.
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Just Waiting on a Dude by Michael McAllister
He pats the bed and you slide in. You follow his lead—you always will.
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A Man To Occupy My Mind by Elizabeth Morgan
I call them my grown-up friends because these women have translated all of that A-Honor-Roll energy into successful careers as lawyers, engineers, and doctors, while I recently ate more slices of deep dish pizza than my brother and dad combined.
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Josh & Rach 4ever by Rachel Ratner
Perhaps their bodies sensed the heartache ahead, the disappointment that waited—that they couldn’t hold onto this version of reality. So they let go of it. All over the theater floor.
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Of Places and Passports by Shazia Rahman
Let me pledge allegiance to the planet. Let me list all the places I love on a passport that actually represents my sense of belonging and identity.
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Daddy by Alex Ebel
Pacing the halls of my house in a pair of penny loafers so dusty they might have been robbed from a grave, I counted on trembling fingers all the ways my night could unfold.
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Redress by Megan Sweeney
To redress: to remedy or set right; to relieve from distress; to make fair and equal; to compensate for wrong or loss. From Anglo-French redresser: to set upright, restore, set straight.
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Where I Was From by Steven Moore - Winner of the Bradley & Stucky-French Prize
I live in a college town in western Oregon and lately people here have been talking about their small-town Midwestern upbringing like it was a war they barely survived.
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Photo of Dr. Harris Mirkin
The Incomplete By Dylan McGonigle
It was at the end of Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times that I'm pretty sure I heard Harris Mirkin crying.
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Primum Non Nocere: First, Do No Harm by Michael Bishop
Consider for a moment the end of your life.
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Black Widow Spider by Sherry Shahan
I stood in the bathroom where they were strongest, inhaling sprays, sticks, and creams, wondering if my parents even liked each other.
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