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Hairwork
by Blair Hurley Her great-grandmother, so she’s been told, lost many children. They were Kansas people, prairie people, who lived in a remote dust-battered town and worshiped in a bare whitewashed church, the singular steeple the tallest thing around for miles. They were Christian Scientists. Going through her great-grandmother’s things in the hot attic of their…
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Failing the Bechdel Test
by Becky Petterson They meet in the middle at the park in their childhood neighborhood. The grass is yellow and shriveled, the leaves already curling toward their mortality. The two women embrace, the distance between them a living topography impossible to measure. “You cut your hair,” Sarah says reaching forward, and Ruth fingers the blunt black…
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Bugs
by Brittany Micka-Foos Jamestown, Virginia, 2002 I pluck a tobacco beetle from the sticky underside of a leaf, hold it between my thumb and forefinger, and watch it writhe. This is my summer job. I am sixteen years old, and I am testing my powers. We stand in a small plot simulacrum of a tobacco field.…
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august rave with all my lovely ghosts
by Vi Ly this lake bristles. navel divulges sea pools of peach cream. wet dream whispers seducing tides to lower their arms and surrender. we empty our mouths to exoskeletons. stargazers. to sticky spindling wonders. i thought about having children then got a new iud. learned to bake. gave each sourdough loaf a little name. wrapped them up in satin ribbon. rocked them on the windowsill. i…
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My Path to The Sunken Place
by Afsheen Farhadi Our fifth-grade math class was getting new seating assignments, a ritual I didn’t understand and even now can only reason as some sort of prison tactic to ensure no alliances formed between students. It might also have been a social training exercise, evidenced by the fact that the rows of three alternated…
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Letter to Pablo Picasso Regarding Guernica Selfies
by Jean McDonough Monday, January 20, 2025 Dear Pablo Picasso, I am writing to inform you that patrons of the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, Spain, are now allowed to take selfies in front of Guernica, your Spanish Civil War painting that illustrates the terror bombing of a small Basque town on April 26, 1937—forgive…
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Who Straightens the Bent
by Mia Herman I was thirteen when I first found out that I had scoliosis. I didn’t even know what it was, really. Or what it meant. But after the first round of X-rays, the orthopedist said there was a forty percent chance I’d need back surgery. “We’ll need to watch her,” she warned my mom like…
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Among the Living
by Alice Hatcher The sole survivor of the car crash that claimed the lives of three high school seniors, including my best friend’s cousin, D, was the last person to arrive for the funeral Mass. She arrived alone and took a seat at the back of the church, as if she had no claim to…
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Bartholin Cyst, Midsummer, New York
by Katie Leonard They’re very common, you know, not even something you can control, just something you get, something some women are more prone to than others, like stretch marks and boyfriends and a heavy flow. A genetic component—primordial destiny. I was moving apartments. Hot summer, twenty-three years old. Fifth-floor walkup to fourth-story elevator building,…
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Making Space for Nothing
by Svetlana Litvinchuk It is the job of the young to paintand wash and bury the dead,to wonder did God create man in his own image, or did man create God in his? In whose image do we shape the object of our doubt? God is here and not here—acknowledging absence is its own way of conjuring.To give form…
