Blog : Beautiful-Things

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Waiting for Owls (rerun)

Waiting for Owls (rerun) By Mark Liebenow   |  July 16, 2018
Evening returns to the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and the land cools. Day follows the sun across the valley floor and up into the mountains in the west. Birds settle down for the night.

The Sweetness of Figs

The Sweetness of Figs By Lisa Reily   |  July 9, 2018
I am at home here like I have not been anywhere else in my life. Home in the heat of dripping fig trees, their treacle tears that drop-by-drop onto the dry ground, the sour smell of wine in the air....

Excalibur

Excalibur By Jessica Gigot   |  July 2, 2018
We sprinted by the worn house with the closed blinds that reeked of pot and who knows what else. I gave the leash a short tug and we slowed to a walk again....

Mail Order

Mail Order By Ksenia Panova   |  June 25, 2018
You know what I heard, I heard your mother was a mail order briiiiiiide. The girl with a thoroughly sensible name in my first-grade class drew out the last word, and I struggled with the new sentence structure....

Leave-Taking

Leave-Taking By Chris Erickson   |  June 18, 2018
Sassafras, shagbark hickory, spicebush, paw paws and sycamores marked the descent to the creek. The untillable acres, as they call them. The hills too steep and outcrops too rocky. The forgotten backs of farms....

The Petals of Summer

The Petals of Summer By Marybeth Holleman   |  June 11, 2018
They lie like bits of tissue on the bathroom floor rug, caught in the fibers; I bend to pick them up and see the yellow and pink threadworn veins, dry and broken and translucent pieces of geranium and nasturtium....

This Is What Men Do

This Is What Men Do By Diana Rico   |  June 4, 2018
At the tiny Eretz Shalom Cemetery on the mesa south of Taos, I feel like I have stepped into a John Ford Western. The impossibly big New Mexican sky dwarfs the mourners standing in sagebrush around a six-foot-deep hole in the ground....

Wish You Were Here

Wish You Were Here By Sunni Wilkinson   |  May 28, 2018
Our three-year-old sits on my husband's shoulders, bouncing. Red rock and yellow cottonwood trees and blue sky surround us. Fall break in Capitol Reef, Utah, and we’re winding up a trail we’ve never hiked before to see an arch...

Tell Me

Tell Me By Denise Wilkinson   |  May 21, 2018
Show me the shape of your thoughts when the doctor announced my cancer. Reveal the colors and the shadows. Tell me not the lines, but the in-betweens, right to your bones. Lament with me the unrest of memories yet to be lived, then speak them...

The River and How She Heals

The River and How She Heals By Amber D. Stoner   |  May 14, 2018
When the house went cold - not the oxygen and nitrogen, but the mood, the atmosphere around my parents - when that froze into stasis, into wariness, into step-lightly-quietly-invisibly, I would retreat outside where I could breathe without...

The Dancer

The Dancer By Jan McGuire   |  May 7, 2018
Mom danced with The Dancing Divas - women in their seventies proudly performing in over thirty elaborate costumes. Accessories included a Fedora with a plastic mafia machine gun, a red suitcase doubling as a small platform for tapping to...

Guavas

Guavas By A. Mauricio Ruiz   |  April 30, 2018
This morning I went out to the garden with my mom and picked up guavas, tiny yellow pieces of fruit that had fallen from the tree and now lay scattered on the ground. I bent over and picked them up, one by one, thought of the time when there was only...

Wrinkles

Wrinkles By Valerie White   |  April 23, 2018
They surround her eyes, her nose, and her mouth. She likes to touch them, to run her fingers over them, to try and count them, although it is nearly impossible to see where each one starts and ends. Each wrinkle seemed to appear with a major...

On Belay

On Belay By Rachael Button   |  April 16, 2018
When I climb, my husband catches me. Peter is younger than me, lankier, quieter. His body weaves up rock with a grace my shaky, short frame cannot yet settle into--but he's learned not to correct or coach me. Instead he holds me on belay...

Learning to Tell Time

Learning to Tell Time By Cathy Luna   |  April 9, 2018
Learning to Tell Time Corpus Christi, Texas: February 1, 1969 It will always be eighty degrees in Corpus and I will always be six when the telegram comes. For me, this day will always have passed as if it were any other. I will always be inside...

Idols

Idols By Nicole Baute   |  April 2, 2018
In September, they carry Ganesha to the river. The bedazzled elephant god sits Sukhasana, mala of flowers around his neck, unlikely to swim. My inherited religion is about a man who rose from the dead, his bloody corpse the symbol...

Reunion Tour

Reunion Tour By Renee Nicholson   |  March 26, 2018
Thud of drums, The Edge’s guitar lick reverberating in our sternums, and the first flinty sound of Bono’s voice. We never expected...

Controlled Burn

Controlled Burn By Traci Brimhall   |  March 19, 2018
Spring is the season for burning on the plains. Ranchers across the tall grass prairies of Eastern Kansas watch the forecast for the stillest days, when wind nests between mountains, before they bring the driptorches to the fields.

Pop-Pop

Pop-Pop By Chloe DeFilippis   |  March 12, 2018
If I put my ear to the hardwood, will I hear the shuffle of his steps? The velcro shoes? I never saw him with his socks off. I imagine his toes like his fingers: thin with long thick yellowing nails. "To grab things with," he told me...

Passenger

Passenger By Tamara Lang   |  March 5, 2018
I nest, my sleeping bag encircling me as I sit, skin-hot down sheltering this present happiness as if it were a round, warm egg. Clouds have erased the peaks beyond the harbor, and I feel the boat that formed my bed tugging at its lines...

Non-Transferable

Non-Transferable By Jen Sammons   |  February 26, 2018
The instant I pull into the gas station, he starts screaming, starts pummeling the back of my seat with his gray and green Velcro sneakers....

Uplifted

Uplifted By George Such   |  February 19, 2018
A memory like a dream without a face....

Afterglow

Afterglow By Elissa Favero   |  February 12, 2018
By morning, feathers had settled lightly in the corners of the bathroom. They swept up into the air, though, as I moved past. Down, up and down. One brushed the nape of my neck as I stepped from the shower, and clamped there to damp skin. A torn comforter; a small domestic catastrophe....

Little Traveling Altars

Little Traveling Altars By Olivia Dunn   |  February 5, 2018
I am calling my current situation 'vow of poverty' because that sounds much nobler than 'slumming' or 'lazy.' Vow of poverty helps me remember that the reason I will eat chickpeas for dinner for the next three nights is because there is a larger goal at hand....

Cooking for Grandpa

Cooking for Grandpa By Rhonda Owen   |  January 29, 2018
Grandpa slumps on the three-legged stool, his clouded brown eyes intent on me as I reach into a cabinet drawer to scoop flour for dredging pieces of chicken soaking in a bowl of buttermilk....

Afghan Roses

Afghan Roses By Francisco Martinezcuello   |  January 22, 2018
In Massoud's Circle, weathered plastic shopping bags are captured by the thorns of Afghan roses. Armored vehicles crisscross in formation. Liberators with their guns pointed bully civilian cars to halt. My convoy breezes by, failing to free the bags from their thorny prison....

Living With Ian

Living With Ian By Mia Aguilera   |  January 15, 2018
My brother Ian and I live in the Pacific Northwest. We have a small brick house with wooden floors and a wall of French windows, letting in plenty of light....

Ripple (repeat)

Ripple (repeat) By Magin LaSov Gregg   |  January 8, 2018
On a rusted railroad bridge overlooking Ohio's Rocky River, I stand with my father beneath an ocean blue sky and listen to the water's murmur. My father removes his glasses and points to a large rock beside the lower bank...

The Day to Day

The Day to Day By Jessica Terson   |  December 31, 2017
Sifting the flour. Squeezing the lever once. And then waiting. For a moment, it is winter again. I take my finger and make snow angels in the little blue bowl.

Wake Up

Wake Up By Krys Malcolm Belc   |  December 25, 2017
I cannot take my children hiking without them mentioning babcia and dziadek and how they like to hike. Did you know they are going to take me camping one day? they say. Our children have seen their grandmother for the last time although she is still alive in a living room in Queens.

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