Sewing Corn to Feed the Rats by Ronda Piszk Broatch

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 over the lake, breaking news like communion bread, wine-soaked and warming your trachea. Someone just tracked solitude in on their boots, someone ran buckets of holy water until the font dried up. Sorrow sings its own jingle, packs the apple…

TCR Talks with Rachel Howzell Hall, author of The Last One

By Dave Oei Rachel Howzell Hall is entering brand new territory with her latest novel. After writing a book series featuring Detective Elouise Norton and ten other standalone crime and mystery novels, the two-time Los Angeles Times Book Award winner has published her first foray into the genre of romantasy with her new novel, The Last One. It features Kai, a sharp, strong, beautiful woman who discovers her clothes are missing, and worse, she has no memory of who she is or why she’s in the middle of a forest. The world is in the midst of drought and a…

Jesus loves me, this I know, though He’s dead by Gale Acuff

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 in her hands, practically her whole head, to make her feel better and said Ma’am, when I was out in the hallway I saw Jesus, which got her attention as if she’d seen the man Himself and said Praise God,…

The Necklace by Leah Fisher

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 and neglected, dust forming pockets of blindness in the corners of my lids. Fuck. It is 3:42 AM. I want to stop looking, but I can’t. I know that goddamn necklace is somewhere, and I’ll never sleep if I can’t…

Portugal by Matthew Moore

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’s Quick Fill by Kerri Brady Long

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 kid was bone-thin and filthy, his pockets jammed full of pilfered junk, his arms full of those gold bars they all tried to steal. Jesus God almighty, it was too hot for this. The AC was blasting inside the mart,…

A History of My Enthusiasms, or Use Everything by Jamie Harrison

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 animation for the first six months to avoid wondering about sales, or to prevent futilely searching for your name on one list or another, trying to reinflate your ego for another event. You love your books but you’re sick of…

My Wife Hangs Winter Clothing in the Closet by Dmitry Blizniuk

my wife hangs winter clothing in the closet I ask myself if I am ever going to put them on again or should I say goodbye to the seasons of the year, to the parka, to the woolen sweater forever? those clothes remember the war, they’ve absorbed its horror like hair absorbs the smell of cigarettes. they’ll never forget. the destroyed world is irreversible. (translated by Sergey Gerasimov from Russian) Dmitry Blizniuk is a poet from Ukraine. His most recent poems have appeared in Rattle, The Cincinnati Review, The Nation, Prairie Schooner, Plume, The London Magazine, Guernica, Denver Quarterly, Pleiades…

The Belt by James Armstong

He’s special, this one. I never would’ve taken him home if he weren’t. And it’s not like it’s our first date. I’ve done this before. I’ll do it again. Unless he’s the one. Whether he is or not, he’s the one right now. What’s that he says? My belt? I picked it up at a thrift store. I tell him that. He says he likes it anyway. More, in fact. There’s a mystery about it, having belonged to someone else. I smile. I watch his fingers as he unbuckles the belt. He peels the pants off my legs. I laugh.…

Ice Writers by Mike Sluchinski

i jabbed the straw down deeper and down into the mint and ice shavings the only ice i want to see none on the page and so hats off to that pants too sarong salutes and i did so carefully i thought who are these ice writers these canadians and their hard luck stories hard rock and but the lakes are nice and cry me twice rivers so stark and has beens like i hate skating and sad streaming winter tears on pages and ice spines the leftovers of salmon and trout so freshwater tears i need salt salt shaker…