Category: Nonfiction

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…