'I get nosebleeds.' I almost wish we all did at awkward moments. How much more easily the awkwardness might be diffused in the humanizing light of the body’s nor “I get nosebleeds.” I almost wish we all did at awkward moments. How much more easily the awkwardness might be diffused in the humanizing light of the body’s normal frailty.
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Cosmic Latte by Ron Huett
This is my introduction to the word and the last time I will ever speak it against another black person.
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Stick After Stick by Joe Griffin
We pulled into the yard and sat in the pickup for a moment, idling in park. 'That was a fucking thing,' said Rob in a low tone. I looked at him, nodding in mute reverence.
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The Fall by Morgan Riedl
The fear of heights is more common in women, but I inherited my fear from my father. He fell out of my life’s orbit when I was 8. I have a hard time safely locating myself in space and time, so I orient myself in relation to others: my father (before he left), my mom (before I left).
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Reclaiming a Name by Negesti Kaudo
For years, I’d pronounced my own name wrong because it was easier, it fit into other people’s mouths better. My mom wants me to embody my name. 'I gave you a strong name,' she says.
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Much Too Real To Ever Disappear: Sound Affects @ 40 by Joe Bonomo
Sound Affects has never left my head. When I listen, the music washes over me in sensations, in snatches of images and phrases, singsong/singalong melodies competing against slashing guitars.
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Point of Origin by Rose Lopez
People say Bob Dylan can’t sing, but if you’ve ever heard his first album, or Nashville Skyline, you know that’s not true. My husband’s family says he cannot sing. But if you’ve ever heard him sing a song about the father who’s not there, you know that’s not true either.
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I Hate Tomatoes (and 83 other thoughts on loss) by Lauren Mauldin
Black shows I am mysterious as all get out. I sit on my back porch, watching lighting bugs with my black nails wrapped around a cigarette and don’t know what the fuck I’m doing with my life as I smoke under the starless sky.
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Where We Stay by Suzanne Manizza Roszak
One night I dreamed that my mother was pulling favors for me in a version of the afterlife that seemed more carnivalesque than majestic. There were arcade games and she was playing them on my behalf, racking up points and prizes to barter for my survival in a world of lost, dissolving girls and insistent, concrete things.
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Hypoxic Euphoria by Ellee Achten
I watched sound escape me in wobbling circles of air, my body moving farther from my voice and from the surface where my calls popped without being heard.
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A Mother is Not a Zero-Sum Game by Elaine van der Geld
Before I became one, I’d never been interested in mothers. Those lumpen creatures with sagging faces, boxy, careless clothes, bad hair, beholden to a small dictator. Certainly, I’d never become one.
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Naming by Katie Miller
But is there something to be said, too, for the maybe? For the way a maybe snakes into a sentence, into a paragraph, into a narrative into a life, leaving holes where certainty could’ve been?
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The Limiting Value of Trauma by Annie Erlyn
The trigger in my mind ticks like a small time-bomb, cratering my concentration with holes.
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For Dorothy, Who Made It By Sara Brody
In this novel, which I would never ask you to read, which once you used to prop open the window during the heatwave in December that gave us cause for dread, there are three brothers. Can I talk about it, just a little?
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We Shot and Shot by Hannah Harlee
I don’t want you to come away from here inspired.
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114, 000 Units Sold: At Every Stoplight, I’m Watching for One by Mandy L. Rose
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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