My Stepmother, Myself
by Abi Stephenson
She didn’t have to love me. Biology didn’t force her hand the way it does for mothers.
Playground Doctrine
by Myna Chang
In the grit of a 1975 farm town, 9-year-old girls weigh about 60 pounds, even wicked little girls with bad women for mommas.
Dear Madeleine
by Stephanie Vanderslice
I can tell you this now. Both times I was pregnant, I worried. I doubted my ability to raise a girl.
Love for Sale
by Benjamin Aleshire
I travel around the world and strangers pay me to write poems for them on a typewriter in the street—that’s how I’ve made my living for the last eight years.
Big Girls Like Us
by Kelly Flynn
Every time I see my father, he asks me if I have lost weight. He has done this since I was a child.
The Iranian Blue-Glazed Pottery
by Lynn Mundell
The Iranian blue-glazed pottery sat on our parents’ shelves for years.
Freddy Krueger is Not Real: the Dream of a Burn Survivor
by Dina Peone
One night in my mid-teens, I was under the covers in my sister’s bedroom, deep asleep, while flames spread from a nearby candle.
Heaven
by Mike O’Mary
“Put on your winter coat and get a warm blanket,” I told my daughter. “We’re going out to look at Christmas lights.”
The Flying Dutchman
by Annette Gendler
February 3, 1946. Rain pounded the railcar’s roof. Karl felt as if inside a drum. A stuffy drum, smelling of wet wool and unwashed bodies.
Grief, Furniture
by Beth Bilderback
This couch was made for grownups, vintage grownups of the 1930s, cinch-waisted female grownups and men who wore hats and drank martinis.
It all began around a campfire…
Beautiful language
is meant to be heard as well as read, and in fact words were vocalized eons before they were ever committed to clay or parchment. Storytelling began around campfires. We seek prose and poetry that continue the tradition.
Contributor Spotlight:
Box Office Gospel
by Marissa Glover
Open Contests
by Stephen Parrish, with the editors of The Lascaux Review
