Archives

INTERVIEW WITH JAMES McADAMS by Jo Varnish

May 25, 2020

James McAdams’s Ambushing the Void is released this month by Frayed Edge Press. I caught up with him for a chat about his book, his writing process, and his inspirations. JV: Ambushing the Void is a collection of stories drawn together by themes such as relationships, loss, and nostalgia, and told through truly memorable characters. Professor Pankova and Teo are two of many that will stay with me. Did you draw from real life counterparts for these and other characters? JM: It’s pretty easy for me to look at a person, or read/hear about a person on a podcast or Tweet,

¿CÓMO ESTÁ TU MADRE? by Phebe Jewell

May 24, 2020

Every morning Mom digs in the garden plot behind our house, dressed in a faded red shirt and ripped jeans. She refuses to wear black. “I’m done mourning,” she says. “I’ve been grieving since the day he enlisted.” Kneeling in the dirt, Mom turns the soil with a hand spade. It’s a small plot, maybe five by seven. She says she’s putting it to bed for the winter. No cover crop seeds yet, so there’s nothing to bury, just dark loamy soil she churns and churns. She’s still there in the afternoon when I open my Spanish workbook at the

“THE LINE” by Michael Seymour Blake

May 23, 2020

A TRANSVERSE PROGRESSION by Alyssa Jordan

May 23, 2020

iv. Late one night, Fred acted on a whim. She reached out to the one friend who still took her calls. Together they stood, poised on a street corner with coffee cups in hand. The Friend was tall and blonde and intrigued. Red lipstick lined her mouth, wet like a bloody smear. She held a cigarette in her other hand, taking demure drags that did nothing to distract Fred from the pink smoke that curled around her shoulders. “How about them?” The Friend asked. When she squinted at the couple heading toward the bus stop, Fred was met with a

SALT IN THE BODY by Kelsey Ipsen

May 22, 2020

Ghosts do not come to me because I grew up by the ocean and my body is still full of salt. Girl; all limbs, all eyes and sudden fearlessness, dared the waves to become bigger and they did. And of course she was sucked under, tossed about, close enough to death. Of course she was rag-doll, rag-doll, rag-doll. Remember when your body was your body but now it is not. The feeling is like this. I know my body is other things, is waves, is salt. Is once a house/a host/a body with another body’s cells in it. The other

THINGS TO SHIP TO AMERICA by Jessica Evans

May 21, 2020

Is heaven a proper noun? Here, I learned to love myself. To love the thick full shimmy of thighs against one another; to appreciate the height of my traps compared to the valley of my clavicle. I fell in love with butter churned from cream produced by cows who live only a few kilometers away. I learned to seek out the salted rotisserie chicken, its skin crispy and shimmering after hours on a spit. As much to bite into something with savage need as because there’s ownership that comes from eating simply to eat. But chicken is only good when

A GROCERY LIST FOR A SAND DUNE by K Chiucarello

May 20, 2020

The grains could never contain me. I had always been a shape-shifting blurry little thing packed tall behind foundation slabs, their windows blown out with the shutters ringing loose, paint chipping off the front tooth. When the coastline birthed me, I was a miracle of wonder: pretty as a Cadillac slicked straight, my mother said. Daughters of the fishermen ran atop me, ribbons rippling in the breeze, pairs of feet driving down towards my candied belly, full of a momentum that had me wanting the snow. I explained by long way of lecture to the hills what it was like

SING TO ME THE ONE ABOUT THE RIGHTEOUS EMBRACE OF THE INEFFABLE by Pat Foran

May 19, 2020

Something My name is Phineas and if I can get the pose right, a photograph of me will appear in the 1979-80 Ridgid Tools Two-Year wall calendar. In a two-piece and six-inch heels, I am holding a No. 930 1/2-inch D-Handle Reversing Drill like it’s a semi-automatic weapon. “I need a little more…something, Phineas,” the photographer said. “A little more serendipity, a little more world-weariness. Show me a righteous embrace of the ineffable. And a little more gam.” *** Level We were fixing up a place that needed fixing up. We were going to live there. Her parents were helping,

BERMUDA by Danny Cherry Jr.

May 17, 2020

It was somewhere between the fifth and eighth rendition of the “birthday song” when I began to see the appeal of a tight noose and a wobbly stool. That’s what this job did to me. I prayed to the chain restaurant gods to put me out of my misery, but all I heard instead was the firework-like pops of sizzling meat and the chefs’ philosophical debate over which one of the new girls had the fattest ass. I sat on the milk crates in the kitchen and scrolled through the social media feed of my ex acting school classmates and

IT ALL STARTED WHEN THE CHALLENGER EXPLODED by Shannon Frost Greenstein

May 17, 2020

I sit, tense, breathless, eyes glued to the screen. I am thirteen years old. It is cold outside, the kind of cold that stings the tip of your nose and bites deep in your lungs when you inhale. It is almost time. We’ve been waiting all morning. I’ve been looking forward to this for weeks, obsessively following the news for mention of launch preparations, reading Christa McAuliffe’s simple biography in The Inquirer: an ordinary history teacher, just imagine! I’ve been lying awake at night, thinking about the infinite nature of space until infinity blew my mind and I couldn’t grasp