Category: Nonfiction

by Caroline Fleischauer       Amid a sea of tents slips a White man holding a camera. It’s 1984 and the camera—a Nikon FM2 with a Nikkor 105mm Ai-S F2.5 lens—is powerful enough to share grief between one side of the world and the other. The tent village sits across Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan, near Peshawar. The…

by Rebecca Callahan wild/wīld/ adjective: wild; comparative adjective: wilder; superlative adjective: wildest tame/tām/ adjective: tame; comparative adjective: tamer; superlative adjective: tamest re·wild/rēˈwīld/ verb: rewild; 3rd person present: rewilds; past tense: rewilded; past participle: rewilded; gerund or present participle: rewilding Rebecca Callahan is currently pursuing an MFA in creative writing from Brigham Young University. Originally from…

by Clara Risser       I have been walking around with a dead baby inside me for five weeks now. My body doesn’t know it’s dead. “Your pituitary gland is not getting the memo,” the midwife tells me, eyeing blood work that proves how confused my body is. I picture my pituitary gland as a young soldier…

by Meredith MacLeod Davidson In the 1640s, two definitions of the verb engage branched from its etymology tree. The first: engage (v.) – “to attract and occupy the attention of”The second: engage (v.) – “to enter into combat or contest with” At nineteen, I had logins on many major image-hosting or sharing sites: Flickr, Imgur,…

by Char Gardner “We did not come here to study the climate of Antarctica. We are here because this is where the information is stored.”—Kendrick Taylor, PhD Desert Research Institute January 6, 1997Four a.m. Desperate to pee. Cold darkness all around. Muffled bovine sounds of ten sleeping men snoring in this Jamesway hut (a Quonset…

by Jennifer Case I.Message to the Tamarin Mother When you have a child and sense you do not have enough community support for that child—that 8 oz. ball of sinew and soft fur clutching the hair on your shoulder—you do not stop yourself or judge yourself or say, what will others think? You do not…

by J. D. Harlock       I. Whatever Happened to the Worlds of Tomorrow?        Whatever happened to the worlds of tomorrow?       Whatever happened to the tomorrows that never were?      Our atomic dreams gave way to cybernetic nightmares. And it seems that, in time, we will fabricate a new vision of what is to come—that, too, will be discarded.      But what…

by Janelle Cordero I.I’m lining up the hair on the back of your neck with a razor—we’re in the garage with the door open because of the lighting, bright but not harsh. I touch you for the first time in weeks, putting my left hand on the crown of your head and pushing forward, using…

by Joshua Carlucci They call us New Appalachia. In 2005 the Congressional Research Service released a book-length report that decided we aren’t much different from the proverbial mountain people on the eastern seaboard. We’re a bit darker in color, though. We: San Joaquin Valley, California. We Valley folk are dopesick, hooked on an industry that…

by Shantell Powell       In the 1970s, my family lived all over New Brunswick before settling down deep in the Appalachian hills of the Acadian forest. Every summer, we journeyed to Newfoundland to visit Dad’s family. I have snippets of memories from my infancy and early childhood. I recall being a baby on a plane with…