By Nancy McCabe In this memory that seems to summarize my whole youthful marriage, I’m 22 years old, kneeling in the loft of a half-built cabin by the Ninnescah River, a manic wind creaking joints and whipping tangled hair into my mouth. The wind scuttles a cup from lunch, hop-skipping it across the prairie below. It snarls my husband’s tape measure as he climbs a ladder, nailing on the siding...
Killing for Non-Majors
By James Craig Hartz Jr. MLTR 1005—Killing for Non-Majors DEPT. OF THE ARMYSPRING 2016, MONDAY-SUNDAY 0000-2359 OFFICE: Washington, DC 22202GAROUA, CAMEROON PHONE: N/A SYLLABUS This semester you will personally investigate the ethics...
I Sing the Mind Electric: A Memoir (excerpt)
By Baz Martin Gibbons “Io fei gibetto a me de le mie case.” — Inferno, Canto XIII It’s 1990. I’m twelve years old and I want to die. I think about death all the time. I think about death and what death might be like, what it’s like to be dead and what it’s like to die—the actual process of dying—the feelings and sensations and the arousal and I think about the thoughts I’ll have as I’m...
How to Erase Femininity
By Leah Gaus Buttons on your grey and teal The North Face backpack: I AM MY OWN FU☺KING SUNSHINE. I love my vagina. Vote feminist. Thoughts that cross through your head as you pin them on: Do I really want the word “vagina” on my bag? It’s not a curse word. Right? Tiny crimson pinpricks on bright white toilet paper—an omen of what may or may not come, an echo of the stress you’ve been...
The Bastard in the Tulup
By David Galloway And I think the reality is that, for me, real fur is extraordinarily old fashioned. I think you look old. Even if you’re 20 and you’ve got a real fur coat, you just look like an old, unaware...
Double Dutch
By Kathryn Chiariello Remember, or—if that fails—imagine what it was like to be four years old. Breathe into your belly, let your side ribs spread, let your chest rise, let your lungs expand into the back of your body. Be alive and aware. My fourth birthday party, mid-April 1978, I wore tights because the day was colder than it ought to be, and the flowering trees were tensed in the cold, and my...
YANG TAO
By Michele Reese Imagine the missionarywho beheld the monkey peach,sought to coax fuzzy skins from seedsback home in New Zealand.The canopy of kiwi would take yearsto bloom (white flowers,unattractive to bees).Imagine her delightwhen swollen fruit droopedfrom green leaves blocking out the sky. Michele Reese is a professor of English at the University of South Carolina Sumter. Her first book of...
Dear America / Beautiful Country
By Esther Ra When I first learned you could murder, I cried.I wanted so badly to believe in you, in yourAmerican dream, which placed shining wordson my tongue. Migak, sense of taste, sweetas apples. Country, I thought, with a conscience. In Korea, we called you Migook, beautiful country.Meaning we saw you as buffalo, full of dark strength,roaming prairies of vast possibility.You fed us...
Changeling
By Samuel Piccone I feel most like his son because there’s no moonlight,just the sound of his axe to prairie darkness, brush on dead brush, the breath it takesto run from sirens chasing in the distance. Every hack and gasp erases the memoryof how small he looked before he stole me from my mother’s house— his wedding band glinting window glass,the silver ache on his face as he stared at the...
The Closed Bedroom
By José Enrique Medina They lock you in your bedroom. You escapeto the snowy scene. Wind shakes snow-bowed boughs & stirscrystal chimes. Here, your father’s fingers, stinking of cigarettes, will never touchyour knee. Here, your mother, calling you faggot, will never find your ear. Besides,you are not alone in this hoarse forest. The wind shifts and readjustsits scarf among branches. You came...