Instant Family
Originally published in The Jealousy Bone, Emdash Publishing, Victoria BC. When Lovey found out that I activated our baby without her, she was pretty choked. “We were going to be together when it happened,” she said, in her little voice. “I had my outfit, the candles, the aromatherapy—” “I couldn’t wait,” I told her. “The waiting…
Read MoreBoots
My mother bent over the sink with a butter knife, scraping mud off the chunky red brick heels of my Hush Puppies. The knife tinged and sang as her arm brought it across my shoe, dirt and gravel chunking down on the porcelain. The sky outside the sink window was gray and dripping with slow…
Read MorePale Ale
Peter, Peter, in among the everyday commuters, picking out your bald spot, gleaming in the burnished window of the train car, shining through the pastel smudge of wayfarers. You used to worry, but don’t—no one looks. None of them, overhead transparencies projected in vain against the purpling light. Shallow set dressing. Circusing and tricks of…
Read MoreUntitled
*Even the colors are anxious, carriedas if its new home above groundwould skimp the way all rows use dirt cut in two with nothing in between–you suddenly bring it a darknessuse one hand to comfort the other though you’ve done all this beforehave no faith in mornings :clumpsthat want only to forget, just lie still…
Read MoreWriting What You Don’t Know
I consider myself an autobiographical fiction writer. My protagonists tend to be middle-aged white women, like me. They grapple with subjects close to my own experience, such as the challenges of teaching a fiction class in Manhattan. Or struggling in a relationship with a mother when anger gets in the way. I’ve found power in…
Read MoreThree Poems
Line Please A line is: a) a sick circle b) an unfolded word c) an aggressive dot d) what you want to erase e) what you regret after you dish it out. —Yoko Ono, ‘Line Talk’ An aggressive dot stuttering now into morse,now to Death’s autograph on ECG monitors, the point of this pen…
Read MoreAcknowledgments
Acknowledgments Artwork The following Creative Commons artwork (Attribution Licence) appear on our Fall 2013 issue index page: All other artwork is credited on the page in which it appears.
Read MoreHot, Hot, Heat
Our gooses were cooked. Our ducks and our swans, too. And not just our waterfowl either, it was all the birds, even the canaries, which really should have gotten our attention when you stopped to think about it, which unfortunately we never did. The air had become too blistering for them to fly, the water…
Read MoreMarion Roach Smith Talks Time Management
Mastery, we’re told, takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. That’s a daunting number, one beyond the reality of most writers. Perhaps it’s time to forget oft-repeated sound bites, to celebrate hours spent doing what we love, and to just find creative ways to address the challenge of being an author in this age. I recently…
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