It was Christmas Day at the prison. Several inches of snow had fallen during the night, and the temperature was a biting twenty degrees below zero. I helped McKenzie, our youngest, zip her pink parka and snuggle the fake fur hood around her beautiful face. Katie, fourteen, and Beau, eleven, were all suited up before McKenzie finished wrestling with her…
Julia Ludewig is a learner, teacher, and traveler with hearts on two continents. She teaches German and Environmental Humanities at a small liberal-arts college in Pennsylvania. In both her academic and her poetic life, writing is her way of thinking with a keyboard. When she is not writing, she dabbles in Salsa and Bachata dancing. She is oddly infatuated with…
Daniel Biegelson is the author of the book of being neighbors (Ricochet Editions) and the chapbook Only the Borrowed Light (VERSE). Daniel serves as Director of the Visiting Writers Series at Northwest Missouri State University as well as an editor for The Laurel Review. Daniel’s poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from Diagram, Grist, Interim, Lana Turner, & The Spectacle, among other places. Find him at danielbiegleson.com
One day a king was visited by a beggar, seeking enough money to have food to eat. Now, ordinarily the king would have him beaten and thrown in jail or worse. But it so happened that the king had as a guest the king of a neighboring kingdom, and wished to appear generous before him. “Give this man five silver…
I like you like mischief, an ‘i before e’ moment, the movement of my heart butterflying, battered, flayed and wired up to monitors and X-rays. When you asked me what’s at stake here, I only heard cake, or was it betrayal, the way daylight holds failure in stasis between aphasia and sainthood? The weather is taking a break, is breaking…
but my Sunday School teacher says nix, He’s eternal in Heaven and sitteth at the right hand of God, or was that on, so I say Yes ma’am, but He’s still dead —that’s when she told me to leave the classroom so I did but after class I came back to her all alone behind her desk, her face buried…
My fingers are filthy. Blackened at the tips with grime underneath my fingernails. I should wash my hands, but I have more to do. I look up at the fluorescent glowing numbers on my dusty cable box. The figures are blurry at first, forming an indecipherable shape. I squeeze my eyes shut and reopen them. I imagine my corneas, dry…
Matthew Moore is a playwright originally from New England currently living in D.C. His work has appeared at the Boston Theater Marathon, the Toronto Fringe Festival, Durango Arts, Two Oceans Theater, and the Chain Theater.
Jessup used to think thieves were the scum of the earth. Scab-picking sleazeballs just a mote better than serial killers, pedophiles, and rapists. But what had happened lately at the Quick Fill? It made him reckon that so-called artists were the true creeping brutes, ranking only a quarter-step above the Devil. Hell, maybe even tied with Big Red himself. The…
At the end of a book tour, rosy thoughts don’t come naturally. You’re alternating between an audience of ten or one hundred, a sense of giddiness and futility. You’ve searched for your novel in airport bookstores, handled reader questions about your use of the wrong car model, introduced yourself to people you’ve met before. You’d ideally be placed in suspended…