Current Issue

Interlude: 1941

Elizabeth Bird

I’d seen the journal before, stacked in a drawer with old photo albums, the staples rusting and staining the pages. . . .

        

        

Photo by Ole Schwander

Giving Up

Sarah Fawn Montgomery

We wave our hands over our heads like frantic birds, hollow bones flying nowhere. We twist but don’t shout, important for girls as small. . ..“Push until your body gives up,” our teacher reminds us.

        

        

        

Photo by Sydney Allison Hinton

The Immaculate Illusion

Sydney Allison Hinton

My former body is a ghost. I don’t have ballet mirrors all around me to see what my body looks like in all positions throughout the day. I have this wispy image of myself and how I think I look…

        

        

Roadside Memorial Wikipedia

The Last Tree on Bluefield Avenue

Tyler Kennett

My grandfather pulls away from the intersection. I play with my action figures. I’m tearing their heads, arms, and legs off before putting them back together in strange ways. I create my own characters, making them fight each other to get their pieces back.

        

        

Collage by Anthony Afairo Nze

Safe At Home

Terri Sutton

This wasn’t my first or last brush with racism, but it was an awakening. I never spoke to that neighbor again, but her actions caused me to raise my radar about the other people in the building.. .. Months later when I decided to move to Ohio, I was ready to leave because I knew this was not my home.

        

        

        

Photo by Ruan Richard Rodrigues

Cracked

Telaina Eriksen

I have been picking my daughter up from places since she was six weeks old. . .. If you had asked me at any point in the last quarter of a century whether I would ever pick my child up from a psychiatric hospital . . . I would have been sure this would never happen to us.

        

        

Why the Tall Building Could Not Stand by Rebecca Pyle

Portrait of an Unreasonable Mind

Rae Katz

When one of these horrific thoughts appeared, it persisted with unwavering strength, clinging in my brain like a pit bull’s locked jaw, accompanied by one illogical, repeated message: You must do it or you’ll always suffer from thinking about doing it.

        

        

Urban Isolation by Lawrence Bridges

Revolving Doors

Anne McGrath

I’m making a day of it, going through as many revolving doors as I can in an effort to notice things in the city that I usually ignore, like the curve of each door’s imprint mimicking the orbit of the earth around the sun.

        

        

California Superbloom by Ron Thomas for Getty Images

Super Bloom

Angela Miyuki Mackintosh

Seeds lie dormant until heavy autumn rains. . .. Then, all at once, they germinate and blossom in a glorious springtime display, releasing their sweet aroma. . .

        

        

Collage by Krista Beucler

The Refusenik

Sue William Silverman

I want to be a reFUSEnik (a person who declines to play by the rules because she is secretly pissed off, as if about to explode). However, you wouldn’t know this just by looking at me.

        

        

Dinosaurs in California by Anthony Afairo Nze

Driving On Acid

John Rosenblum

Amazingly, ecstatically, my body merged into Bel Air’s. The breeze created by our movement caressed our crystal windshield. The smooth road, still warm from the day’s heat, whispered under our soft rubber tires. Together as one, Bel Air and I flew down the beautiful black highway.

        

        

Photo by Ryan Hafey

Old Man, Take A Look At My Life

Sanjiv Bhattacharya

This was his idea. As though he’d sat bolt upright in bed one night and realized that I’d been in LA for four years, his oldest son, and maybe I wasn’t coming home.

        

        

Photo by Jeff Burak

First the Bridge

Jane Bernstein

The voices and sounds are my music and evoke this powerful sense that I am home. The sensory feast, the size, yes; the mass and enormity, the hive of beings, the texture of the built city, the giant silver towers.

        

        

Photo by Alex Houmadi

My First Car

Sarah Kovatch

It sat low and had manual transmission, and I felt like I had earned some rung of adult legitimacy because I finally understood what people (often men) meant when they said you can really feel the road.

        

        

        

Image by David Wilder

Billable Hours

Patricia Foster

We’ve jumped into bed because we’re anxious…’What am I doing?’ I keep asking… I laugh because this is our joke, code for our naked talks as if they’re a high-level therapy session, a reckoning that pushes us into shadows we usually avoid.

        

        

        

Woman Reading the Paper With Her Cat by Kuniyoshe

The Clan of Good Cats

Rachael Quisel

We will go through this ritual twice a day for the rest of his life. Together, we’re one tiny, virtuous cycle, one love story, one quiet anecdote of survival. Two beings who aren’t losing themselves even when they feel all is lost. Maybe, right here, right now, that’s all we need to be

        

        

Collage by Anthony Afairo Nze

My Daughter, My Octopus

Andrew Bertaina

The octopus falls through the depths, where light scatters among the halos of jellyfish. . .. The octopus keeps swimming, I tell her, releasing ink as he falls, darkness falling into darkness, a path where he can’t be found.

        

        

Photo by Hu Chen

Imaginary Child

Janet Gool

The doctor, her hair tied back in a ponytail, a miniature teddy bear hanging from her stethoscope, looked too young to pronounce our fate. She peered at the baby’s face, unclenched her tiny fists, and examined the palms of her hands.

        

        

The Dentist’s Office, the Window Full of Great Boulders by Rebecca Pyle

The Sun Still Shines on the Worst Day of Your Life

Alida Winternheimer

I am going to tell you something that you won’t believe. It is too much, too horrible, too perfect a metaphor. As a writer, I would never use it . . .. But because it happened, it is true and all of those other things, too. Because it is true, it is all I have.

        

        

Collage by Denise Emanuel Clemen

The Loss

Denise Emmanuel Clemen

My son is not this lost baby.. . My son was born in Iowa in 1970 when I was 17. These days, I don’t know where he is. I don’t know his name. I lost him to adoption.

        

        

Collage by Anthony Afairo Nze

Made of Clay

Sherri Wise

The sculpture. . . is smooth and round as a boulder. Her wide back curves into a protective embrace of a tiny infant. . . .I had always found her preoccupation with nursing mothers curious because she herself had never nursed—I was adopted .

        

        

        

Photo by Russell Burt

Learning to Whistle

Teresa H. Janssen

I am, in 1966, a nearly silent child. With three talkative, articulate older sisters, it seems that one of them always says what’s on my mind before I get the chance.

        

        

        

        

Collage by Anthony Afairo Nze.

See: Enclosures

Martha Wiseman

Things within things within other things. The apartment as Russian doll, boxes within boxes within boxes. . ..
The closets were deep. Spelunking was required. Excavation. The archaeology of a life in dance, a life in the theater.

        

        

        

Please Help by Lawrence Bridges

We Are All Broken

Wendy Hammond

Other broken people—the ones with good jobs, good homes and clean clothes—scurry by the mentally ill broken ones without looking.

        

        

Dilsey

Is This How It Is Now?

J.M. Ferguson

A gift of fate, I suddenly realized–a gift I had done nothing to earn, mind you–was now presenting itself to me, following me home from the Station House.