The Raw Naked Urge Of Just Being Alive: A Conversation With Salvatore Pane

Salvatore Pane was born and raised in Scranton, Pennsylvania. His novel, Last Call in the City of Bridges, will be published by Braddock Avenue Books this fall. He is an Assistant Professor of English Creative Writing at the University of Indianapolis. His fiction has been nominated or shortlisted for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Web, and Wigleaf’s Top 50 [Very] Short […]

“Living Off the Man” by Meg Tuite’s Exquisite Quartet

This is the latest in Meg Tuite’s Exquisite Quartet. To go to the column page, please click here. So the end of October came and went and Violet had not mailed a check. No one else in the building had, either, like they had all agreed. Oglethorpe would have to leave his perch down in […]

Never Once Considering How In The World She Was To Get Out Again: A Mix For Going Down The Rabbit Hole by Marissa Landrigan

Marissa Landrigan‘s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Rumpus, Guernica, Orion, Fringe, Diagram, Precipitate, and elsewhere, and she is a regular nonfiction contributor at The Nervous Breakdown. She received her MFA in Creative Writing and Environment from Iowa State University, where she completed a food memoir tentatively titled The Vegetarian’s Guide to Eating Meat. […]

“Fever” by Joseph Han

Martin tells me that he understands death because it just means you get really tired, and that’s why they call it an eternal slumber. Sometimes I care about people when they say weird things. I listen because I also have strange thoughts, so there’s a spot for the strangeys and the weirdos somewhere in my […]

Three poems by Brennan Bestwick

Every Reason I Take Flight 1. This lower lip is all the lift of Kitty Hawk, there are birds building from my toothache. 2. My mother was a moonbeam. My father’s first language is pollen, he is fluent in spring wind. 3. I sing in the key of Franklin kite string. 4. On the night […]

Margaret LaFleur’s Travel By: An Introduction

This is the latest in Margaret LaFleur’s Travel By. To go to the column page, please click here. In the summer after ninth grade I traveled to Europe alone. Of course I mean that I flew alone. Although I successfully navigated a layover at the Amsterdam airport by myself, I was met at my final […]

“The Symmetric Property of Congruence” by Robert Edward Sullivan

Ignore the patches on her frayed jacket. Ignore the bands that you, her, and maybe about a hundred other people have ever heard of. Ignore that top-ten smile. Ignore the sparkling brown eyes—brown does not sparkle. Ignore her playing with her hair, twirling it, biting her lip, in rhythm with her tapping foot, to what […]

“Disposal” by Karen Skolfield

I. The things we once loved, the cracked and tarnished, the black pumps with the broken heel, cane chair unraveled, nicked Mason jars. Trash must be double-bagged though the sign doesn’t say why. The half-lives of plastic. We recycle, we have a compost bin loved by bears. We have a way of letting things go. […]

“Moon Night” by Leanne Kutzer-Gregg

Do you ever have moments when you remember vividly driving down dark country roads in the middle of a summer night? Windows down. Radio on. All alone. Just you and the moon and stars. You pass the neighbor’s tiny retention pond and see the reflection of the moon and the stars and desperately want to sit on the […]

Six poems by Alyse Knorr

In Their Land A man sells thousands of balloons on the shore of the sea they have made. Alice buys them all. Gives Jenny the pink ones and keeps the yellows, lets the rest go easing up into the sky. Jenny says, If I were an old building I’d want to be by the ocean. […]