You Can’t Do This Shit Alone: Toni Ann Johnson and Kate Maruyama Discuss Writing Friendships in the Long Game

Toni Ann Johnson and I were in the same MFA program but not at the same time. We met over email fourteen years ago when we both came to the defense of a mutual friend, and we bonded over our protective instincts for friends. As we got to know each other, we started exchanging work and sharing notes, and life stuff, and over the past fourteen years, a friendship has grown that I can’t imagine living or writing without. Toni is my first reader, the voice in my head, the cheerleader who keeps me going when the rejections pile up,…

At the James P. Abernathy Memorial Fields by Elisabeth Strayer

Despite her general disinterest in the sport, Ava was seized by a desperate urge to be a baseball mom. She wasn’t certain that the phrase meant much in the cultural imagination, not in the way that “soccer mom” conjured a woman at the helm of a minivan, the bearer of halftime orange slices for shin guard-clad children. Those children frightened her: their too-big teeth ripping flesh from spongy rinds, their too-small hands tossing the spent peels to the grass for the soccer moms to gather.  But “baseball mom” sat in her mind like a blank thing, nearly devoid of associations.…

Wildflowers Three By Jacquelin Winter

It was a standard if not cliché motel bathroom, and Mom had been in there a while. In August of 2001, we’d found ourselves at a Days Inn for the weekend—Mom, my sister, and I—despite her losing custody of us six years prior. We were one hour outside of Pittsburgh, in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, though home was even farther, just over five hours east, in South Jersey.  The Rolling Rock Town Fair was a grungy music festival headlined that year by the Stone Temple Pilots, Live, the Deftones, and Incubus. It was rumored to be a kind of nineties alternative Woodstock…

All the Doors Thrown Open By CL Bledsoe

When the bombs come, we’ll be happy ghosts hiding from the giant spiders, our bodies no longer aching from bad wiring, that thing we thought was a good idea that one time and took months to recover from. When the world becomes translucent glass, outshining the jealous stars, and we finally feel  how substantial shadows are from the inside out, dogs will bark at the smell of our souls, cats will beg  us for food our thumbs can no longer open. We’ll fade in the light and deepen under the moon, who will now  know our true names but still…

Somebody Was Here: A Ten-Minute Doomsday Exploration By Brynn Hambley

          Brynn Hambley (she/they) is a queer and disabled playwright, theatre artist, devising artist, theatre educator, podcast host, and freelance writer based in the New York City area via New Jersey. She earned her BA in theatre arts from Gettysburg College and her MFA in theatre from Sarah Lawrence College. Her work explores loneliness, disablility, queerness, and the very human ability to have hope despite it all. In the past, she was a finalist for the Independent International Award for Improper Dramaturgy, 2019 (Antidotal); received the Emile O. Schmidt Award for Excellence in Theatre, 2018; and…

In Lieu of Flowers By Suzanne Lewis

Marin County 1992  From the couch, my parents give me their full, undivided attention. Dr. Groszmann arranges her thick blonde hair in front of each shoulder, crosses one leg over the other.  She nods from her armchair, gives me her you-can-do-this expression. I shuffle three pages of notes, hands trembling. Eyeing the cassette recorder to make sure it is revolving, I take a deep breath as if perched on the high board. “The main thing I want to discuss today is my sexuality. It’s something I’m sure we all know but we never talk about, and that’s that I’m gay.” …

The Play Is the Thang By Elaine Maikovska

Elaine Maikovska is an attorney and writer/playwright living with her husband in Petaluma, California. Her plays have been performed at the Redwood Writers Play Festival. Her writing has appeared in the Argus Courier, The Medical Liability Reporter, and in several anthologies, including 95% Naked, edited by Daniel Coshnear, Vintage Voices, a Redwood Writers publication, and in Beyond Distance, and Crossroads, the Redwood Writers poetry anthologies. Her website is ElaineMaikovska.com.

Two Poems By Cassandra Whitaker

For Queer Kids Doom Scrolling Retweet a curse, a prayer or both, phone a shelter from the wolf that is everywhere but in front of you, in the small space where you are your own joy; there is no wolf here. There is no reason to give your joy to the wolf. Such a beast lives in code, lives in prayer, lives in schoolbooks and stories of yesteryear when everything was so great for the wolf. For the wolf it all used to be so great. Stay alert, queer as you do, as you are, keep ringing the bell or…

Crooked Teeth by Matthew Chabe

I’m standing on the shore with a burnt smoke in one hand and a beer in the other, and John’s talking but I can barely hear him over the roar of the fire. I think he says he’s leaving, but when I look at him, he’s still there and it’s not what he said at all. He said something different and he’s staring at me, waiting.  “What?” I say. He looks nervous and jumpy.  “You heard me.”  I try to pretend that I did, or that I care, but it’s a lost cause from the start, so I stand there.…

America Plays with a Ouija Board By Tyler Truman Julian

during the pandemic. She’s considered close contact, after a bad one-night stand. No symptoms, still she’s in lockdown. The text comes in from the boy, Freedom— what he saved in her phone. Freedom: got tested today. Her mind goes to the sex, lackluster. I’m positive. It’s been weeks—Why are you texting me? How long had it been, lockdown?  A midnight meeting, she initiated it. He bumbled America’s bra strap, bumbled everything. It wasn’t worth it, and now, she reads, Close Contact. She revisits old texts, old messages. Better days. I used to be great, she thinks, sighs. Freedom was no…