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The Brain in Five Acts
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…
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Life in the Deadwood
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…
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The Weight of Secret Wishes and Spoken Words
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?…
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Tell Her
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…
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Still Life
by Sarah Fawn Montgomery She was not prepared for the violence. She did not consent. No one asked, simply forced her legs apart, inserted a finger. She was not wet; it pinched. Later, she would bleed. Seep red and open like a heart, a wound. She tried to look past the face above her to the…
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Our Deepest Sympathy
by Zachary F. Gerberick -For Tricia, her mother, and mine, and for Trinyan I My mother sits at the dining table where throughout my youth we’d spend long, unbending hours assembling jigsaw puzzles, first flipping the pieces right-side up, then, starting with the corners, constructing the frame, the two of us—piece by piece—giving shape to…
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If Birds Can’t Survive
by Kaitlyn Teer Little Brown BirdsWhen my daughter is nine months old, she claps her hands together for the first time while watching bushtits forage in the bamboo that grows along our backyard fence. She stands on the sunroom’s faded sofa and looks out the window, absorbed in the action of birds flying across the…
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There was a boy: Vermiform
by Nathan Dixon I. There was a boy at my mother’s junior high school, which would become my own middle school, a boy whose parents were Christian Scientists. Which made him a Christian Scientist. In the ongoing discussions around consent, we tend to leave the children out. Because I said so. The favorite phrase of…
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Burning a Life: A Memoir of Smoking
by Kate Brandt My first writing teacher, Tom Spanbauer, spoke a truth I’ve always remembered: When we write, he said, we are burning a life. This is the story of ten years that changed me forever. It starts with a lit cigarette, and the story burns from there. Fall 1974: First Drag In 1974 I…
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This is All that Matters
by Amy Kiger-Wiliams My father is having seizures in his hospital bed. The white sheet is drawn up to his mid-chest, his tongue is hanging out the side of his mouth, and his hands and arms are twitching violently atop the sheet. He looks like he might be connected to an electrical current, but the…