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The Bike Lesson

By Desiree Cooper   |  August 1, 2022
Jax perched on his brand-new bike. I stood beside him, a human kickstand. “I can’t do this, Nana!” he yelled, his nervousness masquerading as anger. “It won’t stay up!”

To the Men Who I’ve Talked Out of Leaving Their Wives

By Amber Wong   |  July 25, 2022
When you called, I was careful not to interrupt your soliloquy. Sometimes the best truth comes in fragments, unguarded bits of prose, an ugly tone or misshapen phrase that reveals much.

Cast-Iron Generations

By Tonya Coats   |  July 18, 2022
The cast-iron skillet has been in our family five generations, since the early 1900s. Twice as thick as when it was forged, it has layers of black scales on the outside. An imperceptible skin inside.

One Woman’s Testament to Why “Home” Eludes Us

By Ashley Espinoza   |  July 15, 2022
This Way Back is a collection of seventeen essays about identity. Johanna Eleftheriou was born in New York City, partially raised there and partially raised on the Greek island of Cyprus; she struggles to accept her identity as an American and a Cypriot, a lesbian, a member of the Greek Orthodox Church, and one who lives on the southern half island under the control of the Cypriot government whose origins are Greek.

Seven Weeks or About the Size of a Coffee Bean

By Christopher Notarnicola   |  July 11, 2022
The morning is here again. My fiancée and I have taken to acknowledging the miracle of recurrence. The water is hot again. The towel is dry again. The mirror is us again. And the coffee, about once a week, is the ever-coffee again.

Goodnight Moon

By Cicily Bennion   |  July 4, 2022
Surely, in his two and a half years of living he's seen the moon. But he looks at it now like it's the first time. He knows it, yes, but only from his books on the shelf, the ones I read on nights I'm home for bedtime, when the sun is on the horizon and the blinds are closed.

Here I Am

By Caroline Sutton   |  June 20, 2022
Two-year-old Ella takes a stick and draws zigzags in the sand. She asks me to write her name; I say each letter aloud and she knows that these are the marks that make words that make the stories we read to her, which she inhabits and commits to memory.

A Life, A Marriage, A Family—Intentionally Chosen

By Jessie van Eerden   |  June 14, 2022
In American Honey, a memoir-in-essays, Sarah Wells tells the story of a woman becoming a whole version of herself while navigating marriage and embracing a definition of love that abides mistakes and failures.

Gotcha Day

By Erika Nichols-Frazer   |  June 13, 2022
We adopted Nala the day my mother fell down the stairs. That wasn't her name, but she didn't look like a Mindy.

Thingness

By Darien Andreu   |  June 6, 2022
My husband raps on the kitchen window from the deck outside where the cat sews in and around his legs. "Can you hand me that thing?" he says, pointing unsteadily. The scar from his brain surgery curves over his left ear. An upside-down horseshoe.

Pedestrian Acts

By Susan Barr-Toman   |  May 30, 2022
We were late for an appointment. I wove through the afternoon crowd at a quick clip with my son and daughter, nine and six, following behind me like ducklings. Head down and shoulders bent, I had the posture of someone punched in the gut.

Into the Answer

By Erin Murphy   |  May 23, 2022
Your high school teacher mother taught you a trick for taking comprehension tests: always skip ahead to read the questions before the passage.

Things to do in the Belly of Despair

By Kerry Herlihy   |  May 16, 2022
Blow out the candle that burned for his last days. Dump the OxyContin and morphine in the cat litter like the hospice nurse told you to do. Touch his cheekbones that emerged like knives these last few weeks.

Everything You Hold Onto in Your Body Lets Go

By Billie Hinton   |  May 9, 2022
In autumn, my massage therapist comes to the barn, plugs in her electric pot to warm the large black stones she regularly returns to the river, whose current removes things bodies hold onto: the ache of arthritic knees, tight pelvises, a woman’s chorus of sharp edges, shrill songs of sore muscles and little heartaches.

Whose Family Is It: Mine or My In-Laws?    

By Carole Mertz   |  May 6, 2022
The themes of Kandel’s memoir are twofold. First, as a young married couple, she and Johan, her husband, must adapt not only to each other’s cultures—she is American, he is Dutch—as well as the unfamiliar cultures of people among whom they live and work in very different parts of the world. Second, she must deal with her inability to understand the personality of her father-in-law, Izaak, and the dominance he exerts over his wife and Kandel’s family.

On Turning Forty-Four

By Kim June Johnson   |  May 2, 2022
This was a particularly hard number for me, and in the back of my mind, I knew it was because the late Nora Ephron, in her book about aging as a woman, wrote about how much she regretted not wearing a bikini the entire year she was twenty-six and suggested to anyone reading that they “go, right this minute, put on a bikini, and don't take it off until you're forty-four.”



Tea

By Deb Werrlein   |  April 25, 2022
At every lesson, she serves me tea. She steeps it with cardamom and swirls of evaporated milk then pours it steaming into “my” cup—a white ceramic blue-flowered mug—and adds a heaping spoonful of sugar.

Walk

By Beatrice Motamedi   |  April 18, 2022
I’m at my desk, playing with the idea of taking the day off, when the phone rings, and shit, it’s the landline, the number I dread, the one on too many contact lists and credit card applications to ditch, and unfortunately it’s in the bedroom, across my office and one hallway away, and even worse, I have to answer it...

The Fawn

By Robert Barham   |  April 11, 2022
Hunting was a source of food, the main recreation, and a rite of passage. Everyone hunted. Still, I had a choice. It was dusk, and my father and I sat beside a crop field, plowed over in the fall. We watched from woods that earlier were full of birdsong, canopied by oak, cottonwood, and pecan, when two deer appeared—a doe and its fawn.

Editor's Notes 23.2

By Mark Neely   |  April 9, 2022
Writing these words, a few days before Thanksgiving and a week shy of my fiftieth birthday, I find myself wondering what the world will look like by the time they appear in print. It will be late winter by then, or early spring, a whole season having

Ira Sukrungruang

April 9, 2022
Ira Sukrungruang is the author of four nonfiction books: This Jade World (2021), Buddha's Dog & Other Meditations (2018), Southside Buddhist (2014), Talk Thai: The Adventures of Buddhist Boy (2010), the short story collection The Melting Season (

Jefferson Slagle

April 9, 2022
Jefferson Slagle lives in a small town on the Idaho side of the Tetons, where he teaches writing and literature.

Kathryn Winograd

April 9, 2022
A longtime educator and arts advocate, Kathryn Winograd is the author of seven books, including her chapbook, Flying Beneath the Dog Star: Poems From a Pandemic, a semi-finalist for the Finishing Line Press 2020 Open Chapbook Contest, and Slow Arrow:

Sophie Ezzell

April 9, 2022
Sophie Ezzell is an Urban Appalachian writer. Her work has been published in Pidgeonholes, Aquifer, Under the Sun, and is forthcoming in The Barely South Review and Hippocampus. Her flash essay “Plastic Flowers” was nominated for a Pushca

Suzanne Finney

April 9, 2022
Suzanne Finney lives in Michigan. Her writing appears in the Pacific Crest Trailside Reader, Orion Online, and Still Point Arts Quarterly. She is a certified flight instructor for airplanes, seaplanes and hot-air balloons and holds a private pilot ce

Mary Milstead

April 9, 2022
Mary Milstead is a writer living in Portland, Oregon. She has an MFA in Fiction from Portland State University, and her stories and essays have been published in

N.D. Brown

April 9, 2022
N.D. Brown is a teacher and writer living in Georgia. His work can be found in North American Review, Tulane Review, Speculative Nonfiction, Heavy Feather Review, among others.

Alexandra Teague

April 9, 2022
Alexandra Teague is the author of the poetry collections Or What We’ll Call Desire, The Wise and Foolish Builders, and Mortal Geography, and the novel The Principles Behind Flotation. She is also co-editor of the anthology Bullets into Bells: P

Constance Adler

April 9, 2022
Constance Adler is the author of the memoir My Bayou, New Orleans Through the Eyes of a Lover. Her stories have appeared in Oxford American, Utne Reader, Blackbird, and Peauxdunque Review, among others. She lives near Bayou Saint John in New Orleans.

Steven Harvey

April 9, 2022
Steven Harvey is the author of a memoir, The Book of Knowledge and Wonder, a book- length essay, Folly Beach, and three collections of personal essays: A Geometry of Lilies, Lost in Translation, and Bound for Shady Grove. He is a founding faculty mem

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