Blog
Jars of Daybreak
| November 30, 2020 Roused before dawn, my siblings and I stood at the edge of the kitchen and marveled at gleaming red jars that filled the room. Our parents shuffled wordlessly from stove to kitchen table and back again, their bright faces like blacksmiths' flushed by forge light . . .
After Hours
| November 23, 2020 My grandfather wakes, confused and flooded with his body's toxins. "Sit down," he tells my grandmother. "We're going around a bend." He thinks they're on the train forty years ago. He reaches for invisible handholds . . .
The China Tea Set
| November 16, 2020 The china tea set, wrapped in tissue paper, nestles in its warped cardboard box on the shelf inside my mother's wardrobe. She draws it down gently, as though not to wake it, places it on the bed, slides the lid off.
Photograph
| November 9, 2020 I push through the brambles and climb over the rotting, peeling fence that inevitably grabs at the cuff of my pants. Getting snagged, I always seem to fall cursing onto the beach, an unfitting way to enter the quiet beauty.
What It Means to Bless
| November 2, 2020 In 1959, twelve-year-old Orr rises early with his three brothers, heads to the field with their father. They shoot their rifles and kill a deer. Just as they celebrate, Orr’s gun goes off again, this time killing his eight-year-old brother, Peter.
Keywords: book review
A Good Day to Die
| November 2, 2020 What I remember is the salt that formed in his pores like crystalline grains of sand. A million tiny specks covering his skin. Everywhere, everywhere, everywhere. The hospice nurse said that this meant his sweat glands were shutting down, squeezing out the last drops of his life.
The door with the fresh coat of turquoise paint and brass hinges
| October 26, 2020 I open the door to see if you're there, the door with the fresh coat of turquoise paint and brass hinges. There is a noise, a constant; it could be the rain or the thick of my heart in my eardrums. I've never heard this sound before . . .
Micah Perks
October 19, 2020Micah Perks is the author of a short story collection, a memoir and two novels.
Keywords: 22-1
Molly Rideout
October 19, 2020Molly Rideout is a Midwestern writer whose work has appeared in Fourth Genre, Mississippi Review, Tampa Review, and Bluestem.
Keywords: 22-1
Susan Jackson Rodgers
October 19, 2020Susan Jackson Rodgers is the author of a novel, This Must Be the Place, and two story collections, The Trouble With You Is and Ex-Boyfriend on Aisle 6.
Keywords: 22-1
Editor's Notes 22.1
| October 19, 2020 Sitting here at my desk on April 22, 2020, writing these words, the world as I've known it has changed. Startlingly. Like many, I am locked down, masked, wary, guarding my six-foot radius. Outside, I'm still active, but alone.
Keywords: 22-1
River Teeth Journal Issue 22.1
October 19, 2020 River Teeth 22.1 features the writing of: Michael Dinkel, Emma Kaiser, Julia Marie Wade, Brenda Miller, Allie Spikes, Jonathan Starke, Ren Jones, Susan Jackson Rodgers, Molly Rideout, Megan Harlan, Erin Block, J. Malcolm Garcia, and Micah Perks.
Keywords: 22-1
Megan Harlan
October 19, 2020Megan Harlan is the author of Mobile Home: A Memoir in Essays, winner of the 2019 AWP Award for Creative Nonfiction and published by the University of Georgia Press in Fall 2020.
Keywords: 22-1
Ren Jones
October 19, 2020Ren Jones earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the College of Charleston.
Keywords: 22-1
Allie Spikes
October 19, 2020Allie Spikes served as managing editor of Bellingham Review from 2019-2020 and currently serves as prose/poetry editor at Psaltery & Lyre.
Keywords: 22-1
Brenda Miller & Julie Marie Wade
October 19, 2020Brenda Miller teaches in the MFA program at Western Washington University, and Julie Marie Wade teaches in the MFA program at Florida International University.
Keywords: 22-1
Michael Dinkel
October 19, 2020Michael Dinkel studied art and creative writing at St. John’s University in Collegeville Minnesota and at the University of Alaska in Anchorage where he lives.
Keywords: 22-1
J. Malcolm Garcia
October 19, 2020J. Malcolm Garcia is the author of The Khaarijee: A Chronicle of Friendship and War in Kabul (Beacon 2009); What Wars Leave Behind: The Faceless and Forgotten (University of Missouri Press 2014); Without A Country: The Untold Story of America’s Deported Veterans (Skyhorse Press 2017); Riding through Katrina with the Red Baron’s Ghost: A Memoir of Friendship, Family and a Life Writing Stories (Skyhorse Press 2018); and The Fruit Of All My Grief: Lives In the Shadows of the American Dream (Seven Stories Press 2019).
Keywords: 22-1
The Hart
| October 19, 2020 He steps out of the grass like a god. Thick necked to hold up east-to-west spanning antlers which in turn hold up the entire sky, three clouds and a Northern Harrier. I am caught off guard by his emergence, how he comes from nothing into everything.
Grandmom's House
| October 12, 2020 Our house was like a radio playing six stations at once: brothers arguing, piano keys banging, lawn mowing, blender blending, phone ringing, dog barking. Stepping inside Grandmom's house was like that moment at the YMCA swimming pool when you duck your head under water and all the noise gets muffled and feels far away.
Before the First Frost
| October 5, 2020 The yellowed aspen leaves shimmer like so many pennies against the setting sun, almost frantic in their last-dance enthusiasm for the night's forecasted hard frost. Your neighbor's forgotten garden has little to offer: one ghostly chalk-colored squash that just a few weeks ago was a cheerful orange trumpet blossom.
The Cadence of an Individual Heartbeat
| October 2, 2020 “I’ve always been a hungry reader,” Rebecca McClanahan writes in her newest collection In the Key of New York. Me too. And I often read as I eat: I gobble. But, as with certain transcendent meals, there are books that, from the first page, ask that I slow down and savor: hold the book carefully, turn the pages mindfully. McClanahan’s memoir-in-essays is just such a book. As I read, I found myself asking what qualities define writing that both enlivens and stills the reader.
Keywords: book review
Waste Not
| September 28, 2020 My parents are old and inert, their bones want only to be still. There's not much we can do for entertainment, except sit here, and then for a change of scenery, sit there.
Flicker
| September 21, 2020 I watch her snap the skateboard's tail to the street just like her boyfriend does, mount it, one foot at a time, steady herself and roll to the corner. Her right foot steps off, kicks twice, three times, she accelerates, wheels click on the sidewalk's seams.
Mom's Nighty
| September 14, 2020 I started wearing Mom's nighty after she died. “You don’t remember?” Grandma asks. “You used to spray her perfume on ribbons.” Pink fills my skull. Satin dipped in distilled forget-me-nots. Little boy fingers tying bracelets around small wrists.
Black Hair Matters
| September 7, 2020 My toddler grandchild sits still on the carpet between my knees, her back cushioned against the sofa. I consider detangling her springy hair coils. Should I fix her hair similar to the way my mother did mine? Most school mornings, she would twist my bristly hair into a short, thick braid.
Bathing (Again) at 9600 Feet
| September 2, 2020 Slow Arrow: Unearthing the Frail Children has a sub-subtitle that appears only on the title page: Essays from 9600 feet, an ascension to yet another layer, so Winograd. I will begin at that altitude, in the Colorado cabin Winograd built with her husband Leonard—who features frequently in these pages as voice of reason, asker of crucial questions (“Where are the bees?”), cracker of jokes, watcher of sky, and bearer of arachnid mercy in the form of an oft-used spider jar.
Keywords: book review
