By Matt Dennison Don spends his days walking up and down the street, now, for the exercise, with a straight black cane to support his white Bermuda legs. He waves. I raise my hand from across the street. Between the passing cars he knife-motions the black threads stitched into his throat: lung removed. Points to hip, leg, and side: twenty-foot…
By Elya Braden Devourer (2007), Dana Schutz inspired by Devourer by Dana Schutz What if people could eat themselves? – Dana Schutz, 2007 Before satisfaction, the abandonment of restraint. How long…
By DM O’Connor we walk past pears and apples and grapes and broccoli all fruiting in their five o’clock last day of summer fields although I know tomorrow it will rain and the money will be gone I can’t help but count the passing which are mostly work vans or tractors pulling trailers and she says no one walks around…
By Eric Fisher Stone What can be shown cannot be said. —Wittgenstein, Tractatus His parents stepped off the trail to film a moose. Next dawn no one found the child except a grizzly sow. She lost a cub that spring, nursed the three-year-old, milk thundering from her nipples’ dark gourds, his mouth juiced with butterfat thick…
By Marina Flores My mother and I are fascinated by natural disasters and geologic phenomenon. From the comfort of our couch, we watch television shows and documentaries about people who chase storms for a living, putting their lives in danger for a thrill, or for the sake of research and entertainment. Other days, we watch Deadline to Disaster, a television…
By Will Cordeiro I study the atlas. Our GPS has lost its signal. Glare along the dash. My partner at the wheel. A rush of green. We swerve the mountain roads, a valley sweeps below us. The summer morning, a palpable expanse, comes bracing in our bones. We must have taken a wrong turn at Springerville, near the border with…
By Andrea A. Firth Realtors describe my town as semi-rural, a suburb, ten miles from the San Francisco Bay, sort of country but not quite. The highway exit leads four miles down a winding, two-lane road to the center of the town and an aging shopping center. Once a vast ranch owned by a man named Joaquin and his cousin…
By Katie Dickson Peter’s mother, tanned and laughing in her lime green swimsuit, twisted on the spigot outside the back door. Margo Stiles was unyielding in her cheer, or so it seemed to Peter, and he tried to be happy too. His mother let the water flow from the hose until it ran cool and Peter took a long drink;…
By Zach Murphy The tulips grew apart from each other that spring. The ground cracked and crumbled in ways that I’d never seen before. I watched the foxes and the coyotes battle all summer on Cesar Chavez Boulevard, where the blood would leave permanent stains on the concrete. The reckless packs would flash their teeth, mark their territories, and steal…
By Jackie DesForges Somehow my conversation with Melissa Febos has drifted from cuddle parties to crime fiction. Febos is one of my feminist icons, and crime fiction hasn’t had the most progressive track record as far as fiction genres are concerned, so I’m surprised we’ve ended up here—and besides, we are supposed to be talking about Girlhood, her new collection…