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Scent's Memory

"What's the word where it reminds you of a long time ago?" I'm trying to get us out of the house and I know I sound impatient when I respond. "Nostalgia?" "Yeah," he says, "I love that smell."
Many Lives, Many Bodies

Noble’s slim collection is teeming with ghosts of all shapes and sizes. However absent the hauntings therein may feel to her, to this reader they are vivid and immediate and bold, nestled in dreamlike prose.
Keywords: book review
Clementine Time

There is no time but the time in the kitchen. My father loses track of days, and I buy a "clock" whose only hand moves from Monday to Tuesday to Wednesday, as if distinguishing between the days were important.
Simplify, Simplify

This could be the morning I slide out the door instead of back under sheets and escape before I drink my coffee. My arms unburdened, no one calling me back, no shame or remorse to shadow my escape. Away.
Chosen for Something

Sometimes as a child I would brush my grandfather's thinning hair. He was a long haul trucker turned Pentecostal preacher who mostly showed affection through prayer and cash money, both of which he handed out at random to his grandkids.
Footfalls

On the plane home, out the window, all I see is empty sky. As a girl, when talk of dying arose, I always gazed up to where I am now, drifting past the tops of snowy clouds.
Sneakers in Sand (repeat)

The baby's shoes were nowhere. That morning was spent in the chaotic swirl of cleaning and packing the vacation house
One Word Says It All

Where—or what—is your hearth of hearths? Where is the place you feel most alive or connected? What is the thing that reminds you who you are and to what (or whom) you belong? In all the world, what do you call home? These are some of the questions that Annick Smith and Susan O’Connor pondered as they edited Hearth: A Global Conversation on Identity, Community, and Place.
Keywords: book review
Ritual (repeat)

Most nights I nurse my four-month-old daughter to sleep. The internet connection is terrible in our bedroom, the light thrown by the little green glass lamp not enough to read by, so I end up sitting in the semi-dark, looking across the bed to the window, or down upon the face of my baby in her steady, drowsy pleasure.
Mars and a Reflection of Mars (repeat)

"There are two red planets tonight," I say. And you reply, "What a brave universe." And I feel brave. Two 30-lb packs hang near the tent we pitched just before it got dark enough to need headlamps. It’s Night One of this backpacking trip.
The End of the Movie (repeat)

Today: summer afternoon on the front porch as thunderheads grow over the top of a giant oak. In the yard you perform perfect cartwheels, your legs long and straight in the air.
Bare, Naked (repeat)

Rain falls, dimpling puddles. I kick off my clogs. My toenails shine like sparkling pumpkin peel. I slide my underwear and jeans down my legs, unsnap my bra, pull my sweatshirt over my head, lay my folded clothes on my shoes.
River Teeth Journal Issue 20.2

Featuring the writing of Rachel Weaver, Jeff Gundy, EmmaJean Holley, Anne McGrath, J. David Stevens, Jill Talbot, Sam Pickering, Evan Reibsome, E. J. Myers, Elizabeth Miki Brina, Rosanna N. Henderson, Chris Siteman, and Fleda Brown.
Keywords: 20-2
The Teacups (repeat)

At the boardwalk, everything is past its prime: sweating hot dogs, mashed bags of cotton candy, melting ice cream. The workers move by rote--lifting and lowering the gate, pulling up on harnesses, scanning tickets. I slump in line.
Shapes Shifted, Senses Altered, Values Freely Wheeled

There may be no more startling way to bait readers into an essay than this: “Is there a word for the unsettling sensation of sitting down on an unexpectedly warm toilet seat, because someone used it just before you and sat there for a good long while? Maybe something in German?” The author titles it: “FREUDENSCHANDE: PRIV(AC)Y,” that is “joyful-shame.” Using wilder “made-up” German compounds as section titles, she compares the “bowel mover” in the “public privy” to the commodious confessions of personal nonfiction, the emotional “shitshow” so many memoirists and essayists insist readers must sit with.
Keywords: book review
Playboy (repeat)

When my mother caught Chris and me looking at Playboy, we knew we were in trouble, but to my surprise she did not get angry. She took me into the house and pulled out the large glossy art books with paintings by the Impressionists.
Stand Up Tall

My father turns his head, puts me on the floor, opens the screen, and walks out the back door. Just the silhouette of the bare trees shadowing night's sky is all I can see. I stand there for long minutes listening as night whispers peace.
Elizabeth Miki Brina
July 20, 2019Elizabeth Miki Brina is a writer of literary nonfiction. Her work has appeared in Hippocampus, Hyphen, New Delta Review, and Under the Gum Tree, among others. Her first book, a memoir, is under contract with Knopf.
Keywords: 20-2
Fleda Brown
July 20, 2019Fleda Brown’s collection of essays with Sydney Lea, Growing Old in Poetry (Green Writers Press), came out in 2018. The Woods Are On Fire: New & Selected Poems was published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2017. Her eighth collection of poems, No Need of Sympathy (BOA Editions, Ltd.) came out in 2013. Her memoir is Driving With Dvorak (University of Nebraska Press, 2010).
Keywords: 20-2
Jeff Gundy
July 20, 2019Jeff Gundy’s eighth book of poems, Without a Plea, is just out from Bottom Dog Press. Recent essays and poems are in Cincinnati Review, Artful Dodge, and Terrain.
Keywords: 20-2
Rosanna N. Henderson
July 20, 2019Rosanna N. Henderson’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Tahoma Literary Review, Salt Hill, Fourth Genre, and West Branch. She grew up in both Virginias and currently lives in Portland, Oregon.
Keywords: 20-2
EmmaJean Holley
July 20, 2019EmmaJean Holley is an MFA candidate in nonfiction writing at the University of Iowa. Her work has been published in Columbia Journal, among other places.
Keywords: 20-2
Anne McGrath
July 20, 2019Anne McGrath’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ruminate, Lunch Ticket, Brevity Blog, and other publications. Her audio stories have aired on National Public Radio, the Brevity Podcast, and Petrichor Audio Magazine.
Keywords: 20-2
E. J. Myers
July 20, 2019E. J. Myers was born in Denver and raised in Colorado, Mexico, and Peru. He has worked in a wide variety of professions and trades, including inpatient health care, emergency medical services, carpentry, cabinetmaking, and freelance writing.
Keywords: 20-2
Sam Pickering
July 20, 2019Sam Pickering grew up in Tennessee and has spent the past fifty years in New England, where he taught English at the University of Connecticut. He has written some thirty books and hundreds of articles entertaining himself and the occasional general reader.
Keywords: 20-2
Evan Reibsome
July 20, 2019Evan Reibsome is a veteran of the Iraq War, an Assistant Professor of American literature at Louisiana State University in Shreveport, and the Director of the Veterans Empathy Project.
Keywords: 20-2
Chris Siteman
July 20, 2019Chris Siteman lives in Massachusetts. He teaches in the English departments at Suffolk University and Bridgewater State University. His chapbook, PART X of ME, is forthcoming from Pen & Anvil Press.
Keywords: 20-2
J. David Stevens
July 20, 2019J. David Stevens teaches English at the University of Richmond. Recent essays appear or are forthcoming in Post Road, Sonora Review, and The Gettysburg Review. His most recent book is I and You, a story collection from Arc Pair Press.
Keywords: 20-2
Jill Talbot
July 20, 2019Jill Talbot is the author of The Way We Weren’t: A Memoir (Soft Skull, 2015) and the editor of Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction (Iowa, 2012). Her essays have appeared in AGNI, Brevity, Colorado Review, Hotel Amerika, Longreads, The Normal School, Paris Review Daily, and Slice Magazine, among others.
Keywords: 20-2
Rachel Weaver
July 20, 2019Rachel Weaver is the author of the novel Point of Direction, which Oprah Magazine named a Top Ten Book to Pick Up Now. Point of Direction was chosen by the American Booksellers Association as a Top Ten Debut for Spring 2014 and won the 2015 Willa Cather Award for Fiction.
Keywords: 20-2