Mara Lee Grayson – Cross-Country Hydatidiform
Cross-Country Hydatidiform Passing thoughts: Knife first, then turtle shell. Brown cow rubs white face against a fence. Woman, almost middle aged and ill situated there as any oil well in nameless green rurality, both dense and spare: if not lost, she is alone for words among the cluster trees that leave her feather-tongued and prickly […]
Catherine Gonick – Sister Mary Joseph Serves Lunch in Ávila
Sister Mary Joseph Serves Lunch in Ávila Fierce Mother Teresa and quiet Juan, her much younger, but equally powerful protégé, can’t stop themselves from levitating like thousand-layer cakes raised by inner fires when they talk of God. Bearing trays of steaming sancocho I see them as I pass on my way to the refectory where […]
Theodora Ziolkowski – Pregnancy Doll
Pregnancy Doll On the farmhouse carpet was a doll. The doll wore a fluff of blond hair, a blue smock. Pregnancy Doll, we called her. To play with the doll, we pressed the stethoscope to her chest, listened to her heart. Prepping her with pretend ointment to reveal the grainy portrait of baby. Then we […]
Kathy Goodkin – Antinarrative
Antinarrative Let’s mount a staircase into memory, where the elevator is always broken– because it is summer and the dormitory is officially closed, shut against the city crows and pigeons, the fat sparrows like bullies lining the pavement, although people (we) continue to live here, unpermitted– into memory’s eighth floor, memory’s close quarters. It is […]
Tarn Wilson – First Marriage
First Marriage I spent what I earned on potato bread from a German bakery. Sometimes our only meal for days, we ate it by the fistful, We were young and hungry and our bodies could run on cheap chocolate and fallen apples from other people’s trees. Those first winters, ice blanketed our world: each blade, […]
