Category: Nonfiction

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,…

by Alison Mandaville Rape      This is not an essay about rape.      This is an essay about memory and forgetting. Judge      Seven years ago, I found myself writing, revising, and sending two-page, personal, in-depth letters to Jeff Flake and Susan Collins, both Republican senators representing states where I have never lived. It is unlikely they would ever read the…

by Andrew Cominelli       In early 2021, I write a short piece of fiction based on a real-life suicide. In the story, a mother and her middle-aged daughter sit at a table, mostly in silence four decades after the tragic death occurred. The story is about their inability to talk about the dead boy, a brother…

by Suphil Lee Park       As Uncle Seung’s hand reached for my waist, I wondered for a moment whether he was going to give me a ride on his shoulder. I awkwardly froze, halfway holding my arms out, as his hand left something in the kangaroo’s pouch of my favorite overalls. I had turned seven just…

by Annabel Li Born and raised in Shanghai, Annabel Li loves writing and surfing.

by Ophelia D. Knight       Tell them you love them. Tell them not to worry. Tell them that things happen. Tell them that you’ll be fine without them; explain that you’ll miss them but you’ll live. Tell them that you will send letters filled with love and news of your everyday life. Tell them that you…

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 1. (of an animal or plant) living or growing in the natural environment; not domesticated or       cultivated.       A small girl in a photograph: lined up with siblings and cousins, standing at the edge of her       parents’ property, tangled hair hanging to her waist,…

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,…