by Rochelle Jewel Shapiro I want you, my husband, in your nursing-home bed, no longer able to breathe while you chew, sustained on...

by Rochelle Jewel Shapiro Hurricane Donna, September 1960 When the sea meets the bay, water bursts like a bomb over docks, breaks the...

By Mark Watney Behold! How gladly22 it is    how goodly23 it is when two brothers    build together an earth-dwelling24    a hobbit-hole...

by Lynn Glicklich Cohen To be deft means unleashing shackles of technique into a swarm of skill, pure abandonment of steps; you lift off...

by Linda Mills Woolsey “Can I put the dollar in for you?” she asks. Her dark eyes shine like molasses in sunlight, her scraped-back hair...

by Linda Mills Woolsey For months we’ve been stirring and stirring strange thoughts, awash in a sea of angers, watching ideas swirl,...

by Mary Beth Hines The girl who lives next door watches the quiet backlit drama unfold from beneath the willow tree in Alonzo’s backyard....

by Matthew Miller Your silence is a gift. A sand partridge quivering and whistling. We furnish the path for ourselves, for now, giving...

by Johanna Caton The buck stood at the border of dark forest and meadow, looking toward the open space. Even a prodigy of evil big as a...

by Susan Francino Rather weighed down by tone-deaf singing, the record of my own dead prayer, I emerge from the church —first to leave,...

by Laurie Klein Overnight, new toadstools shoulder through sodden grass the way sorrows emerge, one after another. Traveler, in a season...

by Violeta Garcia-Mendoza Praise the sirenwail, the barking that accompanies the fire whistle, that whips itself into howling for its own...

by Jenna K Funkhouser I. this is the night we walk backwards into blindness into silence this is the daybreak we bear unrecognized...

by Daniel Rattelle Fishing-drunk in the Connecticut and no miraculous catch, you row for home. What short thrusts from stern to bow you...

by Laurie Klein In God’s backyard, roosting birds reawaken the old throes interred within us—personal heartland, tangled as any natural...

by Andrew J. Calis Greens and blues, the yellow light turns red spreading itself across the floor of the chapel. And warms through the...

by Susan Francino I didn’t ask the caterpillar with its antennae tangled criss-cross in a cobweb if it wanted to be healed, but when I...

by Jenna K Funkhouser Wind ripples off the shaggy tops of mesquite trees and threads a ribbon of bending grass. The ground is stern and...

by Laura Klein . . . a long obedience in the same direction . . . —Friedrich Nietzche From the get go, two habitual waders rise—the...

by Joshua Jones I heard you call my name. The wire of your voice pulled tight through the hallway. Expecting to find you marooned on the...