His lungs were filled with air motes and twice the size of pulchritude. The gong of the cathedral’s bell nor the recitations of catechisms could save him, as a dole can save a drifter marooned in an icy updraft. I swear his eyes were all pupils, two chthonic magnets, and as he approached I awaited the darkening. The squall of…
On page one, a scratch of coastline where the ocean rehearses its apologies. On page two, the swamp’s green choir, all throat, all patience, all hunger held behind the lily pads. On page three, a man selling boiled peanuts from a cooler with a cracked latch. He smiles at you as if he knows what you buried under the seat.…
Jane Fonda says addicts don’t get married to people who pay attention, but I don’t think Mike and I were addicts. Anyway, not that I noticed right away. Sure, he’d be drinking pepper vodka by noon on Tuesday, and there was nothing I didn’t owe. Were we self-deluded? We had our strategies of denial and avoidance, like everyone else. I…
Kayo Chang Black is a Taiwanese Canadian writer who explores hybrid identities, global citizenship, and the intersection of cultures. Her librarian and writing careers brought her to the U.A.E., Bahrain, Hong Kong, Sri Lanka, and the U.S. She is currently based in Taichung, Taiwan, where she is working on her collection of essays while being mom to a six-month-old baby.…
Step 1: Listen to your older brother when he hands you a joint and tells you not to smoke it alone. Find two friends to smoke it with in the woods behind the high school before the ninth-grade dance. When you get to the end of the joint, eat the roach. Twenty minutes later, when you freak out in the…
You are dying. You have known you are dying for some time now. You have known, really, since before the test you took at the free clinic came back positive. Even the times before, when it came back negative, somehow you knew it would get you eventually. The dramatic irony was just too much to resist. This was always going…
Lee Chabin is an emerging playwright and fiction writer who explores themes of identity, community, and intolerance and is committed to developing compelling, authentic narratives for the stage. He is a mediator and lawyer who has been published in the New York State Bar Association Journal and is a two-time winner of the Parenting Media Association Award for the Separation…
John had always imagined his daughter would one day turn out just like him. He was wrong. In fact, June was nothing like her mother Maggie, either. It was as if she’d been dropped off by a stork, a stork working for Jesus. Of all their dissimilarities, her love of Jesus was the weirdest. They’d never gone to church as…
It keeps me limping in these clayey, foot- tamped cuts, working my way through lilting shoots and thorny boughs that look like stanzas. Bare- foot, I feel warm sensations in the deep ruts left by long-gone waggoneers, whose cold words cling, frost-like, to the echoes of my heels. My throat swells shut from allergens I’ve kicked up—my lozenges are almost…
Alina Zollfrank dreams trilingually in the Pacific Northwest. Her work has won the DIAJ Award and been nominated repeatedly for Best of the Net and The Pushcart Prize. Her creative nonfiction and poetry have recently appeared or are forthcoming in The MacGuffin, Salt Hill, Burningword, Gyroscope Review, Bicoastal Review, Stonecoast Review, and Sunlight Press. Alina is a haphazard but passionate…