Cars usually worked well. Joey or Alan would decide which way to go, and I would run away, try to angle a path to my house, hoping I would outrun them at least to my yard, believing I would be safe there. Getting beaten up felt like a hobby I had taken on, not of …
Too swift, she says, too insatiable. Don’t you know these things take planning? Father was salt-skinned and whiskey; built coffins in the mustard plants, in the hard mud. Chopped boards from the porch. From my bed-wall, my exorbitant spine. Back to river, bones to fish: perfect thief, I started small: sticks of butter from the …
Down in the woods you must go to find where the thing doth grow! Through the fields and past the weeds far from the trees that lay their seeds. Deep in the forest dark and dim growing in the strangest grim. Hidden from a hobbit’s view fully crispened in the dew. Tender to thy …
Continue reading “Hobbits Sing a Mushroom Song”By Angelica Kingsley
“Try the coffee.” The suggestion was a simple one, delivered warmly by an attendant in a Turkish restaurant in the heart of Istanbul one July day. But what she didn’t know was that I wasn’t a coffee drinker. I shook my head and pointed to my half-finished cup of warm Turkish tea instead, the drink …
And so we pull off the interstate, not because Evelyn and the kids care in the slightest what St. Ignace, Michigan looks like in July but because she needs a breather after white-knuckling the Mackinac Bridge in driving rain. When she thinks I’m not looking, she shoots her not another word eyes into the rearview …
Sweat trickled down his brow, stopping hesitantly in his thick sideburns before rolling down underneath his plain white undershirt. “One more time?” the little boy said earnestly. One. More. Time. The words stuck with him like glue, transporting him back to the sultry afternoon in a backwoods church in southwest Alabama. St. Stephens Pentecostal church …
Candles for Orlando, June 15, 2016 Five hundred, twenty-five thousand, six hundred minutes. What happens in the span of a year is a blur of motion: feelings smeared across a moving train, purple sorrow, red hurt, green anger, and yellow fear. It’s a whirlwind of emotion, pain twisting around regret and spiraling into depression. But …
After tragedy— when cherished bodies break— we see things clearly. I’m driving to the hospital with lilies for my mother. Ian C. Williams is an MFA student at Oklahoma State University. He has received the Florence Kahn Memorial Award from the National Federation of State Poetry Societies for his chapbook, House of Bones, and his …
“What are you in for?” The man above me said. The bed creaked as he rolled over to the edge and peered his bald, pale-white head down at me. His skin was unkempt. His five o’clock shadow glowed in the low light. It made my skin itch. “A domestic disturbance. It was nothing really.” I …
Continue reading “But I didn’t do anything!” By Michael Heiss
The first time I did cocaine was off Billy Joel’s face. My boyfriend, Shawn, lined a row over Billy’s mouth on the cover of Piano Man. I remember leaning down with the dollar bill in my fingers, locking eyes with Billy, wondering why his eyes were sad, and wondering if I was going to do …
Continue reading “Wasted? So is Your Life” By Jacqueline Kirkpatrick
Burnt Pine 