“Tradition charges us to meet        the dead with questions. When did you find yourself loved? Night / ends Shabbos, still we do not hunger         for work. My friends, I will couple my train / to yours, always. This is me tracing          faith’s queer dance.”

Poetry - 20 November 2024

“This land of nearly invisible, white & purple irises. Thick stocks of rosemary. Italian plums. My father is getting old. I didn’t see it until I saw him breathing.”

Poetry - 13 November 2024

"She named the pig Babybel, even though Mac told her not to name it... But eventually she started calling it Baby, the way she’d coo at a dog she didn’t know, and as the summer luxuriated in brilliant blue skies and Annabelle grew fonder of the pig, nicknames abounded, and Babybel stuck."

Fiction - 30 October 2024

"The baby is wrapped in a zip-up sweatshirt with Atlantic City screen-printed in bold block letters. The baby’s feet are relaxed, moving with the train. My great sadness: it is an illusion that we can save anything at all. Money. This day. These baby feet in their precise attitude of repose."

Poetry - 09 October 2024

“I sat in the conference room and stared. Chaos, good. Everything gone to hell, correct. A bird gobbled down a torso and I loved it.”

Non-Fiction - 17 April 2024

“I consider the way I fall in love too fast – a few kind words & I'm a dog let in from the cold.”

Poetry - 10 April 2024

“Do you play the violin? / No. But do you know I tried / to embrace my wickedness?”

Poetry - 20 March 2024

“You can see our red roof. Our jeep with the cracked windshield. Our dad insisted it was our real neighborhood. It was him, even, that brown speck on the screen.”

Fiction - 6 March 2024

2022 Contest Winer

Prose - 28 February 2024

2022 Contest Winner

Poetry - 21 February 2024

2022 Contest Runner Up

Prose - 14 Feruary 2024

2022 Contest Runner up

Poetry - 31 January 2024

“It’s been a year since you moved here, to Oklahoma, from West Virginia, in which time you’ve enacted your ritual of mourning.“

Non-Fiction - 17 January 2024

“There, across the edge of the border, we / watch a boy stare into another country. “

Poetry - 6 December 2023

“are like stones like tearing / paper are keen to the surface”

Poetry - 15 November 2023

“Of course, I don’t know any of these family stories yet. For the moment, I am busy contemplating other things, like the dust playing in the morning sun of November. Kneeling on the Persian rug, I uncurl its tassels with a broken plastic comb.”

Non-Fiction - 28 October 2023

"I eat lemons, though. One of the nerves / in my mouth doesn’t work quite right because I’ve eaten / so many."

Poetry - 22 October 2023

"Cockeyed voices brought me into being— / the Ozark crackle of peanut brickle, / the perfect rhyme of den and kin that no /school could untangle from my crooked mouth..."

Poetry - 14 October 2023

“Some days, Fidelity chews tobacco, / spits why-nots and splits herself — / skull to toe…”

Poetry - 11 October 2023

“Here, under cellophane, lollipops gleam like my dreams. Working in the candy factory, smelling warm vanilla sugar, girls want to eat the air, to kiss each other…”

Fiction - 7 October 2023

“Our cat leapt upon the young garter snake. / I had to pick up a brick to crush what would / not die. A perfectly shaped head with eyes, / crisp against a plantain leaf…”

Poetry - 4 October 2023

"But he, delirious and perseverating on the fowl, / (and, we’ll find out, severely dehydrated) starts spinning / a matrix of grouse offspring in his mind"

Poetry - 30 September 2023

"our cruciferae in the garden box / we built from Wilfred’s moving sale. We packed / up planks, gutted his beds of amended / soils..."

Poetry - 23 September 2023

"It was dark on my way home from the Happy Wok so I cut through the oval under the streetlamps’ orangey glow. The ground around the elm tree was empty except for one lump on the pavement, a small animal, a brightly colored bird."

Fiction - 9 September 2023

“Let's hold space for [ ] [our bodies not transparent]”

Poetry - 2 September 2023

"Rocking, your eyes look across the room and land on a window, reach out the window, and catch a squirrel leaping, a leaf falling, a finch, an adjustment of leaves against wind. All of these things in their place, also reaching."

Non-Fiction - 26 August 2023

“charging closer and closer, the stony heaven / of his little hooves breaking tender over / my chest…”

Poetry - 19 August 2023

“Back in the Midwest, all is silence smeared strawberry red with seeds left in your teeth. River water still stains your skin indigo. . .”

Non-Fiction - 12 August 2023

“so she can mimic the songs of other girls, / yes, yes, yes. A quiet refrain. A little restraint”

Poetry - 5 August 2023

"When it walked into our bandstand, pushed the challenger out of their stool with its hoof, and stood across the table from the reigning champion, Gordon Zeleskey, we realized that this deer was here to play.”

Fiction - 29 July 2023

“Gravity seeped into the bag like rain each week, opening the hole wide as a wing. I remembered to cap it with a palm whenever I went out, but a grain or two flecked the earth at every step, leaving a path of shucked-off teeth behind me, hollow and pearly.”

Fiction - 22 July 2023

“The last time dad was / at the Honolulu Memorial, / there was no paved road, / no office, no map with directions.”

Poetry - 15 July 2023

“The page is sacred for us because it’s one of the few places where we’re able to say whatever we want. It’s a place where we can speak to ourselves, and to one another, without white people interjecting or overhearing.”

Non-Fiction - 8 July 2023

“a ballast of his own frailty an inscrutable nature of charisma unafraid to meet / a stranger he asked to borrow $600 for a trip to see me”

Poetry - 1 July 2023

“It should matter that we’ve both been crying in the grass, / miserable with teeth whose hatching is and was our first act / of wanting to escape ourselves. . .”

Poetry - 24 June 2023

“. . . When beaten, / the lanternfly’s gray, spotted wings spread / to reveal its coral body and yellow blood.”

Poetry - 17 June 2023

“‘Now I lay me down to sleep…’ I didn’t love it, so I rewrote that too. I added Mary into every prayer she wasn’t in. I made faces in church. I was annoying in Sunday School. If there was no room for Mary, then where was there room for me?”

Non-Fiction - 10 June 2023

“… on a low table, a celadon rice bowl / has become a skull sprinkled with dust and dead moths”

Poetry - 3 June 2023

“it rains small frogs sister holds open her hands we place the bodies in spare tires”

Poetry - 2 May 2023

‘’I’m buying him the eight-dollar bath bomb/ because he got two shots in his arm and screamed/ I feel like I’m dying, mommy!”

Poetry - 18 April 2023

“sometimes i feel like a pita pocket /of desire.”

Poetry - 6 February 2023

“Measuring my days out in spoons, I begin to feel like Prufrock.”

Non-Fiction - 15 December 2022

“I’d like to watch the lack of turtles /without recalling how I laughed”

Poetry - 1 December 2022

“The last drag on the cigarette ocean, break is over,/get back to work.”

Poetry - 15 November 2022

“He creeps, slow as a barn shadow,/through grass with sharp hope.”

Poetry - 1 November 2022

“Though your familiar is familiar, I know nothing”

Poetry - 15 October 2022

“During that last July together, our yard’s thirsty grass yellows from neglect.”

Non-Fiction - 15 October 2022

“Mostly, it was the chimpanzee who wore them.”

Fiction - 30 September 2022

“There are no beige-carpeted bathrooms here./No frozen lasagna from the salvage grocery.”

Poetry - 15 September 2022

“Before the rapture I was always cold.”

Fiction - 15 September 2022

“On my first day of secondary school I go in early with Mum. We’re all dressed up.”

Fiction - 1 September 2022

“Cities hold their shape as they recede. Into mist or distance—I lose them looking from the train.”

Poetry - 1 September 2022