Category: 16.2

  • Biography of the Blade Back Girl

    by Sara Biggs Chaney & Michael Chaney Sara Biggs Chaney has published poems in Sixth Finch, Blackbird, Rhino, Sugar House Review, Juked, Columbia Poetry Review, Pank, Gargoyle, Thrush, and more. Michael Chaney has been published in Michigan Quarterly Review, Fourth Genre, Los Angeles Review, Minnesota Review, New Ohio Review, and Prairie Schooner.

  • Postantiquity

    Runner Up ~ Blurred Genre Contest 2019by Kimberly Andrews : The new midwestern climate of the intellect: Albertus Magnus attempting to reconcile Aristotelian doctrine with the conviction that fundamentally, deep sadness is not productive. Gloom must not cause you to steal beauty products, you must still shower, your suspicions must be formulated as timely critique…

  • Walks Like a Lion

    by Nancy Au Ms. R, 80, stole salmon roe, sweet Japanese creeper, a frying pan. Fourth term. Final sentence, two and a half years. Has a husband and a son. Imprisoned for trying to run from her husband’s delusions and paranoia after his stroke. Shoplifted breath. Stole companionship. Ms. R, 80, said to Life, I…

  • Beach Reads

    by Corey Farrenkopf Raphael leaves a tattered copy of Dracula in a nook behind the Smiths’ toilet paper rack. The week before, he left The Shining in the Hamiltons’ pool house. He placed his copy of Cthulhu tales in the top dresser drawer of Mrs. Sherman’s wardrobe, beneath lilac lingerie. Raphael cleans vacationers’ homes. Their…

  • Fish Girls

    by Meghan Callahan It’s a Wednesday night and we’re all in the living room except for Natalie, who is making popcorn over at the microwave. The TV broke last week because of a power surge or something, and the landlord has promised that maintenance is sending someone to repair it, but they’ve been promising to…

  • Like Mother

    by Harrison Geosits My mother is Filipino, fresh off the plane, and I am her half-breed son, the firstborn son, but I did not inherit her Pacific Islander DNA; I am not thin and tan and woman-hungry like her father and brother and nephews and other son, I do not have the same un-grown-up-ness; I…

  • By the Time I Finish This Book

    by Elizabeth Vignali The northern white rhino will be extinct. My oldest daughter will get braces. I will go on a date with a social worker. I will throw away 540 sandwich bags. I will throw away a beat-up Barbie dollhouse too trashed to be donated. I will throw away forty-seven toothpaste caps, white-ridged floating…

  • Playing the Body

    by Matthew Mastricova When I was 12, I had to draw a scale model of myself in class. I did my best to obscure the measurements from my classmates, writing them as small and crooked as eyelashes. When I shrank myself down to a size that would fit on an 8.5×14” sheet of paper, I…

  • Buttstuff

    by Emrys Donaldson Susan Sontag led me to sodomy. When I read her work, I considered how my early art experiences were incantatory, magical; art was an instrument of ritual.i The moment when I started in surprise at the shade of gray used in a painting at the Fleming Museum because of its uncanny mimesis…

  • Lemon Seeds

    by Vero González A few months before leaving for Whidbey Island, I start having a recurring nightmare about miscarrying in the woods, alone. I don’t tell anyone. Why would I? I am not pregnant. I will be at Hedgebrook, a dream writing residency for women writers, for four weeks. I will figure out a structure…