Category: 17.2

by Katie Berta I am a truth but also I am a truth beneath an I, like a skin under a skin or layers and layers of clothes, which means I don’t have to listen when someone tells me the truth of my truth on the surface, the skin-truth that doesn’t at all account for…

by Rushi Vyas When I found my Bapu’s body hangingI felt everything at once. Not sadness. Not relief. Not fury. Not this. That was no outof body experience, no moksa, no warbler on its last breath, no morning mist rising off a highway, meadow, or sound.When I found Bapu dead it was everything. No sun on my soaked…

by Sara Kaplan-Cunningham I’ve fired a gun only once:With my father in Maine.The instructor was a hairy, uncle-man,Walked like he was being filmedFor a commercial advocating our Second AmendmentRights. One hand on his holster, the other thumbingHis jawline. Safety was important to him,He said. So, when I hit the target and swiveledTo see my father’s…

by Darren Higgins Remember the smell of wood smoke and wet leaves and sweetcut grass in the buzzing field. The moon hanginglike a curl of smoke above the mountains. How sleep finally comes. A snap of electricitywhen you flick off the light. It’s like a fly caughtbetween the blinds and the window. Lemon soap. Pomegranate shampoo. Darren Higgins…

by John Sibley Williams Dying two hundred timeswith as many rebirthssounds like a lot work; papering the earth redwithout so much as a war,no sacrifice, tears, eulogy. & never the same sparrows,never knowing more thana season or two the living bodies born in your arms.Remember how terrifiedwe were those long sleepless nights huddled over cribswaiting for the absence of…

by Leslie Williams One ski weekend last year there was thunder, hailhigh wind, we had all arrived inside after a good dayon the mountain: eating, laughing, warm at the lodge’sfire. The storm seemed contained above a layer of cloud,though flashes still were visible. My friend decidedto take her children out on the patio to dine…

by William Fargason I don’t say     his temper was a sunflare     his belt across my backI don’t say     his word ever the last sound each afternoon throughthe hallways     I don’t say     muscadinesay     buckeye say     serrated say the woods     the only place I felt safeI don’t say my shirt     ripped down the backlike a sheet of…

by William Fargason The morning after the reunion, my father and Idrove to the family grave plot outside a small townin south Georgia, across a set of train tracks,which looked smaller than it should’ve been, as if the train that rode them was only onebuilt in the imagination. One headstonedisplayed the family name, as if the…

by James Merenda The apartment’s kitchen has high ceilings,easily fitting three wedged sides of a lofted floor to become my bedroom space when I losemy job in New York and move into my long-distance partner’s homein Oakland, the fourth wall played by an opaque sheet drapedon a sliding ringed track. For the year I’ll live there, my partner’sother partner…