Category: Nonfiction

by Aimee Seu I don’t know when I learned my father was a pastor who slept with the women in his congregation. Grief was a spare room where we put things.  Inherited memory of my father singing karaoke: O my love, my darling, I’ve hungered for your touch…the Righteous Brothers’ Unchained Melody, deep untrained voice I…

by Amanda Gaines I didn’t want help. After all, I’d put together the matching yellow couches I’d ordered online in less than two hours, both of which managed to not only stay upright, but hold my weight. The apartment I’d moved into was open and wide. I’d hauled in all the clothes, books, shelves, and…

by Will McMillan       I didn’t know better because I didn’t know anything. That’s why I went out with him. Thirty-five is so late to come out of the closet, so late to begin that awkward, sweaty procedure of dating. Especially internet dating. Especially gay internet dating. From the filtered profile pics of tanned faces I’ve…

by Andrea Ruggirello              One morning when I was in high school, I borrowed my mother’s earrings. Round, gold cages with pearls in the center. No one at school seemed to notice them, but I held them gently between my forefinger and thumb as I sat in class. Somewhere, on the walk home maybe, I lost…

by Najla Brown Ingredients: 1 two-syllable name that’s been marinating in four generations of not-American to be placed on a floured roll sheet for unsuspecting mouths to taste. 1 stick of unsalted child to be left out until her identity melts into something palatable enough to spread on toast. 1/2 tablespoon of corrections poured straight…

by Amanda Kallis The last snow on the planet will be red: red from bacteria in spastic bloom. A feast on arctic plains before the lights go out. I hunt for details like this, the lurid and symbolic, that will give the end of the world some teeth in my mind—because, try as I might,…

by Tracey Lynn Lloyd I.My brain is a marvel. A team of psychologists at St. John’s University makes an appointment to marvel at my brain. Dr. Curlie, PhD, doesn’t want to test me because Black children don’t score well on IQ tests, meaning that we don’t have high IQs? “Do it anyway,” my mother says through clenched…

by Katherine Ahl       Most people thought that things had just gone back to my not being pregnant. There was going to be a baby, and now there wasn’t. People couldn’t grasp that there was a body to bury. I needed to talk to someone who had been through it and could say I know. I…

by S. Miriam Merces “If you get any bigger, your mother will have to sew feed sacks together. You’ll be too big for store clothes,” says my father on my right. His teeth scrape along his dinner fork.      On my left, my mother pierces a lump of flesh in gravy.      “Do you have to chew so quickly?…

by Georgia Cloepfil He sent me a link to the trailer, and I watched it with headphones on during my flight from Portland to Los Angeles. I couldn’t understand a word of the video. I pressed mute in the bottom left corner of the screen and tried to improvise a dialogue. A divorced family, an…