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CAKE
by Chantelle Chiwetalu They both watch the bead of blood crawl down her left leg. This is the fourth month, the wife says. This is the fourth month, the husband says. If I don’t find the solution to our problems, call me bastard, the wife says. I will never call you bastard, the husband says…
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Burning Haibun for Thomas(ine) Hall’s Cross Cloth
By Chris Watkins After torrin a. greathouse Sing, godx, of one with many names and forms. Rage for Thomas(ine) Hall, born 1603, Newcastle. Sing of one driven far from home and into war. Sing an epic-sapphic, seraphamic, many-winged song. Sing! Let us learn. Tell how, in those days, comely James I tried to conquer,…
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BRING SAGE!
By Natalie Louise Tombasco Girls, this calls for an excavation:come with hard hats and field notes, sharp trowels and sieves. Brush the earth from ancient secrets, from the gold-clad wristthat gestures toward rotten tooth truth—did I lose half a day of skiing for this? Some of you are beyond repair. But this is an emergency!Axe down every…
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Out for a Drive on a Saturday Night
by Tina Silver In 1982, Markham, Ontario, was a populous but irrelevant Toronto satellite, straddling the line between rural and suburban. At my high school, every student was white, depressed to some degree, and trying to act older. If you were sixteen—and I was—you were more often asked, “Where do you work?” than, “Are you…
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Lot’s Wife at the County Fair (32)
By Amelia K. Bloodsick and crumbling like first place ribbons you can’t eat, and no one wants to preservea peach gone soft at the height of the season greet pain that makes atheists out of so called saints tyingribbons on a lover’s wrists scarless like a baby no one asked forand no one is allowed to give back,…
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Tzedakah
by Spencer Wise Mark Bergman was standing to the right of the bema, which faced Zack Stein’s good side according to his mother. Mark didn’t have the heart to break it to Susan that at thirteen every side was awful—but particularly here, beneath the windows of Temple Emmanuel, where the backlight washed him out. The…
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Commedia dell’Fredo
by Anthony Correale Our city is built into the crack where the Red-Nosed Mountains meet, scaling nearly to their spherical rubber peaks, the city’s foot spreading wide into the beautiful bowtie-shaped bay. The Elder Clowns for which we are famous sleep their twisted rag doll sleep entwined about the city’s gates, doubled over its tall…
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Bicycle Trees
by Heidi Klaassen On Vashon Island, Washington, there’s a tree that’s famous for having grown around a bicycle. Despite a compelling story about a young man leaning his bike against a tree before going to fight in World War I, the truth is it was abandoned by a local boy in 1954. He’d received it…
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The Liquor Store Delivery Driver Considers Theology
By Andrew Hemmert From what I can tell, most of the drivers believe in God,and a god is a good thing to have if driving is your job.At the end of the interview, my soon-to-be boss told mea motorcyclist hit one of our cars going ninetyin a forty-five. Died instantly. Our driver survivedbut couldn’t shake…
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Tithe
by Katelynn Jasper Abigail looks at the bandaged spot on her hand clasped in prayer with the other. For a brief moment, it had looked like that of the unsullied cloth wrapped around the waist of the church’s Crucifixion of Jesus. Now it is a deep red, stiff with dried blood. She is grateful for the…
