By Tom Baird As I wake up, I find my left side is numb where I have been lying on it, and my hand aches from having supported the weight of my face, which is also kind of greasy to the touch, something that you clearly needed to know. My…

By Tom Baird As I wake up, I find my left side is numb where I have been lying on it, and my hand aches from having supported the weight of my face, which is also kind of greasy to the touch, something that you clearly needed to know. My…
by Benny Diaz III Rudy Esparza didn’t like to dance. He couldn’t understand how people could do it, how they could coordinate their hands and their legs to do what the music told them to do. Even as a child, Rudy hated to dance. He used to make fun of…
by Keryna Stutts Her hands were a blue-green map of work and tears of Sunday dinners of scrap quilts. She held the world when his pain became too much. Cracked then filled with weariness. Her hands became my world of fried pies after school, a cool softness on my brow….
by Keryna Stutts no one ever knew the things that happened when the doors closed when school would end and home was the only place to go in those days the afternoon was scarier than the dark
by Norman Belanger “Oh for cripe’s sake, would you look at that!” Her first sip of soup ends up mostly on the front of her Easter blouse. She daps the tip of her napkin in a water glass, blots at the red stain on floral silk. “For Christ’s sake!” Nearly…
by CG Fewston The old man stood in the haze of China’s greatest city with two certainties on his mind: one, the haze (caused by contaminants, such as Sulphur dioxide, from Beijing’s industrial district) warmed the December day and the good earth to a magnitude when snow must retreat from…
by Anne Eston I hold my head the way I held that robin’s egg when I was six. Unsafe in the nest Grandpa stole (he said it fell out of a tree), the egg sat. I took it, was careful… I couldn’t take care of it. Didn’t think it would…
by Bethany Veith You haunt the notches- breeze through the birches, soar through the pines, shake through quaking aspen, and echo through the intervals. Your spirit rises from the evaporator, sap swirling, thick with sweet fog sugar water dripping down the rough pine walls and onto my pages, comforting me…
by Michael Christopher Cole I walk into ‘The Golden Derby’ and look around before the hostess has a chance to greet me. Alec stands from his chair and waves to me. I walk over to him. He has a sport coat and tie on, which is fairly ‘decked out’ from what…
by Bethany Veith We fought against the cold sweat dripping in August as we split hardwood and stacked it just so upon wispy grass and purple asters. The summers vanished like a dream. Wood smoke settled into the valley stippled with red and orange maples silhouetted against the frosted White…