Enter: The Clown.
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The Third-Best Clown in New York by Aaron Rabinowitz
Suddenly, the building’s main door banged open. Something heavy was being lugged up the stairs. Kevin slid behind me and dragged open the apartment door.
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Terminal Degrees by Angela Townsend
I have letters after my name, but they are profane, so I do not use them. The saints in the catacombs would rise up and declare me anathema if I did. But the transcript says what it says.
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Delivery Window by Alison Powell
I never meant to raise my own children, not all the time, anyhow. Not like this. Some days I really miss John, but really what I miss is when people could seem like whole cities instead of swamps.
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In the Crowd by Joe Bonomo
What does it mean to perform? I was onstage, and yet I wasn’t; I was playing to someone, and I was alone.
Read MoreThis land is by Bill Marsh
Without trying, D and B are helping me understand the truth about forever—that it works both ways and travels the earth in all directions, thwarting all human attempts to move forward by going backwards.
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Turn Away by Stephanie La Rose
Permanently installed in my mortal mind’s corner sits Mrs. Eddy, ram-rod straight on her wooden chair, dark hair pleated, expression severe, Victorian jacket battened down, white ruff protruding round neck and wrists.
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The Smokers’ Daughter by Rosemary Harp
My mother lit her first cigarette on waking. My father smoked himself to sleep at night. They smoked as we carved pumpkins, sang Christmas carols around the piano, dipped eggs into bright dye. They smoked in our bedrooms while they read aloud to my brother and me. My mother, a skillful and innovative cook, especially for the time, smoked while making dinner every night, an ashtray balanced on the back end of the stove, lighting cigarette after cigarette on the gas burners under simmering pots.
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Will We Hear it Coming? by Amy Benson
I adopted my father’s fears, but the fear on tap at church spoke to what felt like my native suspicions—that harm was gestating in me in the shadow of an inevitable but unpredictable cataclysm. I learned to be in constant fear of my thoughts, lest something unforgivable dash across them at the very moment of the apocalypse.
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Margo Price Macro Doses by Joe Bonomo
Price is a difficult artist to box-up, for those so inclined. She’s lived in Nashville, Tennessee for decades, and has both courted and been denied Music City’s trappings. A dynamic study in contrasts, she grew up in rural Illinois but sings with a southern accent; her debut album was released on maverick Jack White’s Third Man Records, hardly a Nashville industry staple (though it may be on its way); she cut a live album at historic and revered Ryman Auditorium, waltzing (and rocking) within a storied tradition.
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Sleepless by Ann Hood
“But here was evidence that maybe, if this ever did happen, I wouldn’t be able to scream or run out the door. That something—fear, disbelief, paralysis—might keep me right there, in place.”
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The Plague of Lice by Julie Marie Wade
Lousy: a permissible way to express displeasure, even contempt, without resorting to the verboten profane. Profanity, after all, could get you sent to your room, your mouth scrubbed out with soap, or worse if the Lord’s name was taken in vain. But lousy had a strange twist to it, a little corkscrew in the language that opened a different bottle.
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A 1993 ZR1 Spyder by Rachel Sudbeck
The hotel where I worked saw a pilgrimage then of portly old men with mustaches and cabbie hats, their stomachs tucked into ill-fit jeans. They came into the lobby weeping, clutching at their thinning hair like the oracle at Delphi, asking God or me or whoever else was in the room why this had to happen to those beautiful machines.
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Pusha Man by Evan Massey
“Breathe, dawg,” I declare to one hand-length worm. Because I want everyone and everything I love to breathe.
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Fridge stocked with food
Disordered Eating: A Chronological Annotated Bibliography by Mauri Pollard Johnson
At age eight, you watched an episode of Full House about dieting: D.J. eats ice pops and hangs pictures of thin models on her fridge; you know this is to bring awareness to the dangers of extreme dieting, but you keep these as techniques instead.
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Florida Woman by Lenore Myka
The most frequent and famous of the stories sent to me wasn't about a Florida man but a Florida woman. A twenty-something former-model-turned-meth-addict, she'd been responsible for burning down a 3,500-year-old bald cypress tree which, at the time, was considered to be the oldest of its kind and the fifth oldest tree globally.
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Of Pumps and Death by Marcia Aldrich
I hardly dared open my mouth, even to say something innocuous like “Sure, I’m hungry. I could eat dinner.” My words might be analyzed to reveal something knotty, something sinister I didn’t know I felt but really ought to know I felt.
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In the Rearview by Gaye Brown
When you become invisible, as widows do, you welcome opportunities to reappear.
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The Things Not Seen by Krista Lee Hanson
If you are going to stare. If we must be so visible. I want you to know some of the depth, the multitude, the layers of us.
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Joy and Pain, Sunshine and Rain: On Teaching/Reading Ross Gay’s Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Even when his poems take a darker turn, such as recalling the murder of a friend and colleague, or the bittersweet memory of a childhood crush who has since passed away—there are moments of true grace within these elegies—a slowing down, not in pacing but in memory’s leaps.
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