“One minute it was road beneath us, and the next was sky.” —Ani DiFranco The hotel lobby is square, all elegant chandeliers and dark leather chairs. Jazz standards float above the concierge. Women click by in impossibly tall heels. Elevator bells chime. I lean against a column in the center of the room. Outside, […]
The gravity of Sambuca alters migration patterns. Yesterday, a name smacked against the window, the bleed of each letter a trickle. Today, a comma guts the hot water heater. Refrigerator shelves pang. Tomorrow is a phone booth with a broken door. J. Bradley is the author of the forthcoming graphic poetry collection The Bones of […]
“You can’t wear that,” the guard says. “It shows too much skin.” “Wah? I’m not showing no skin,” the girl says. She raises her arms in protest and flashes her midriff. The guard points at her bare skin with the electronic wand. “That’s what I’m talking about,” he says. “We told you last time, too. […]
Emily Rapp wrote the blog Little Seal during her son Ronan’s life. She began the blog after Ronan was diagnosed at the age of nine months with a rare form of Tay-Sachs disease. Rapp says in her book about Ronan’s life, The Still Point of the Turning World, that she “…began to write because it […]
[flash fiction] At Gaffney’s, we feed the jukebox and dance with pool cues like they’re bolted to the ceiling until the men in town for the races buy us drinks we’d never order for ourselves. Rum Punches. Tom Collinses. Whiskeys with unpronounceable names. Theater majors, we thank them in thick accents—Russian, Spanish, German—trading some touchless […]
He’d pissed himself again. Thaddeus felt the familiar wet warmth saturate his diaper, one large enough to fit on a 16-year-old’s body. Perhaps he would feel ashamed if it weren’t the third time it had happened that day. And besides, who did he have to impress? The nurses? His fellow roommates? His unmoving eyes observed […]
My younger sister Beth is driving home from a visit to her college town. She is flipping through songs on her iPod, listening to her friend Matt talk in the passenger seat. Christmas was a few days ago and snowflakes drift lazily through the air, too light and swift to land. The day seems simple […]
I am not your stereotype. People often have a preconceived notion of what Attention Deficit Disorder looks like. They imagine little children running around like wild animals, having temper tantrums, not paying attention, lacking the desire to learn. When I explain that the scene they imagine isn’t anything like my life, they don’t believe me. […]
Camille T. Dungy was born in Denver, Colorado and grew up in California. She received her B.A. from Stanford University and M.F.A. from the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Dungy is the author of Smith Blue, winner of the 2010 Crab Orchard Open Book Prize, Suck on the Marrow, and What to Eat, What to […]
[flash fiction] I’ve wanted so badly for so long to tell someone about the triangles, the ones I see when I close my eyes and sit in stillness, or as still and silent as my monkey mind allows. One day, I’ll work up the nerve to tell a coworker over sandwiches in the break room […]
Please God let today be like any other day. That’s what I say every day before I get out of bed. That’s what I’ve been saying every day for the past six years. After I brush my teeth, I start my console, wear the headset, and log in to a multiplayer. When Mom hears my […]
No one thought much about Marley returning as a ghost. That sort of thing had happened to loads of families. It was Marley returning and insisting that she was pregnant that caused a stir. A month after she died, she just walked through the front door and into the living room where we were watching […]
You hear them on NPR, read them on websites, store them for cocktail parties and first dates. Every second: a hummingbird’s wings flap 80 times. Thunder rumbles 1,100 feet. Four to five people are born; two die. At least 100,000 chemical reactions fire in your brain. You lose about three million red blood cells; your […]
“A woman like that is not a woman, quite I have been her kind.” Anne Sexton For my first appointment at the fertility specialist’s office I wear all grey except for my boots; these are shiny, cherry red. The four-inch heel makes me look tall and lean, as does the loose grey wrap I’m wearing. […]
[flash fiction] “Promise to tell me . . .” I can almost feel your breath in my ear. If you were standing here with me tonight, I wouldn’t say a word—and I wouldn’t have to, knowing you. You’d scoop it up like birdseed in your palm and blow it away, laughing. Your laughter, I love […]
When I crested the hill and caught my initial glimpse of Fort Westbrook, I began to feel for the first time that being uprooted from Jacksonville, moved to Virginia, left with my mom, sister, and a new house full of boxes while Dad shipped off to fight pirates—it might not be all bad. Living on […]
It wasn’t fleeing. It was a road trip. It was a chance to bond, an opportunity too rare to pass up, and I was blitzed out of my mind from the possibilities that lay before us: a grown, jobless man and his retired father on the way south in late spring. It seemed good. It […]
1. The cardboard box is longer than wide, wider than deep, and it’s dragged out into the middle of the floor where a team of six adults is given the task of opening it and assembling the contents (a bike) 2. In this instance a small group of adults is given twelve pieces of uncooked […]
American author Mary Gordon was born in 1949 in Far Rockaway, New York. She was an only child to her mother, Anne, who was Catholic and her Jewish father, David, who converted to Catholicism when he was a young man. The death of Gordon’s father when she was seven years old deeply impacted her life. […]
I grab my baby and run outside, screaming for help. No one steps outside when they think there’s trouble. It’s hotter than hell on this shit hole street in Tucson. The neighbors are sitting inside drinking beer, cursing the humidity that’s sucking away the coolness from their rusty swamp coolers. I’m standing on the road, […]
[flash fiction] We stop for our morning atole—that thick crushed corn drink con chocolate, de los Indios. Hot, hot, hot. Like cereal, so much better than the gringo café, just makes me want to poop. All morning. Standing in la basura—la basura—reaching past my knees. I try not to look at it, but now, I […]
In the past couple years, I’ve written essays about writing bondage erotica at the age of thirteen, suffering from bipolar II, and idly standing by while my Nazi cousin nearly killed a man for being black. Once, I wrote an essay on bisexuality in which I was tied to a bed having trouble climaxing while […]
He’s winding through a residential part of town in his modified, unmarked Crown Victoria. It’s a sunny weekend morning and everybody not actually driving seems to be out in their driveways washing and polishing their cars. He’s responding to a possible automicide out in Carmichael. They wait at Watt and Edison, caught in the web […]
Patrick O’Neil is the author of the memoir Hold-Up (13e Note Editions, Paris, France). He is currently in the process of writing a second book chronicling his former career as a roadie/road manager for several major punk bands during the 1980′s (Dead Kennedys, Flipper, TSOL, Subhumans). His writing has appeared in numerous publications, including: Fourteen […]
Uncle Roger is at the bend again, right on the rim of the road before Cow Camp runs into the Newland Tree Farm. He waves at my car as it drives past, but he is in the sunset. I wish I were older, sitting with him, with no place to go but wherever my feet […]
In the attic, I cut off my Ruthie doll’s blonde hair to make her look more like me, to see if her golden locks will grow back. She wheezes when she breathes. I pick two broken crayons from the floor and scribble on her left cheek the blue-black of a bruise. She recoils, looks up, […]
Wendy C. Ortiz holds an MA in clinical psychology and an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles. She’s a Los Angeles native who lived for eight years in Olympia, Washington before returning to Los Angeles. She lives with the love of her life and their daughter. Wendy has read at various venues […]
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