For years, I’d pronounced my own name wrong because it was easier, it fit into other people’s mouths better. My mom wants me to embody my name. 'I gave you a strong name,' she says.
Read More
Much Too Real To Ever Disappear: Sound Affects @ 40 by Joe Bonomo
Sound Affects has never left my head. When I listen, the music washes over me in sensations, in snatches of images and phrases, singsong/singalong melodies competing against slashing guitars.
Read More
Point of Origin by Rose Lopez
People say Bob Dylan can’t sing, but if you’ve ever heard his first album, or Nashville Skyline, you know that’s not true. My husband’s family says he cannot sing. But if you’ve ever heard him sing a song about the father who’s not there, you know that’s not true either.
Read More
I Hate Tomatoes (and 83 other thoughts on loss) by Lauren Mauldin
Black shows I am mysterious as all get out. I sit on my back porch, watching lighting bugs with my black nails wrapped around a cigarette and don’t know what the fuck I’m doing with my life as I smoke under the starless sky.
Read More
Where We Stay by Suzanne Manizza Roszak
One night I dreamed that my mother was pulling favors for me in a version of the afterlife that seemed more carnivalesque than majestic. There were arcade games and she was playing them on my behalf, racking up points and prizes to barter for my survival in a world of lost, dissolving girls and insistent, concrete things.
Read More
Hypoxic Euphoria by Ellee Achten
I watched sound escape me in wobbling circles of air, my body moving farther from my voice and from the surface where my calls popped without being heard.
Read More
A Mother is Not a Zero-Sum Game by Elaine van der Geld
Before I became one, I’d never been interested in mothers. Those lumpen creatures with sagging faces, boxy, careless clothes, bad hair, beholden to a small dictator. Certainly, I’d never become one.
Read More
Naming by Katie Miller
But is there something to be said, too, for the maybe? For the way a maybe snakes into a sentence, into a paragraph, into a narrative into a life, leaving holes where certainty could’ve been?
Read More
The Limiting Value of Trauma by Annie Erlyn
The trigger in my mind ticks like a small time-bomb, cratering my concentration with holes.
Read More
For Dorothy, Who Made It By Sara Brody
In this novel, which I would never ask you to read, which once you used to prop open the window during the heatwave in December that gave us cause for dread, there are three brothers. Can I talk about it, just a little?
Read More
We Shot and Shot by Hannah Harlee
I don’t want you to come away from here inspired.
Read More
114, 000 Units Sold: At Every Stoplight, I’m Watching for One by Mandy L. Rose
I hear my children in the backseat, reading the numbers and letters out loud, recognizing whether the car we can’t stop watching belongs to their father.
Read More
Touch Me, Baby by Joe Bonomo
Shuffling through a box of old 45s is like letting fistfuls of soil leak through your fingers. Organic matter, minerals, microbes all seem present on vinyl and worn labels, the grooves veritable garden rows. Heft, ballast, stuff in my hands.
Read More
Selections from Babyland By Hadara Bar-Nadav
The walls at the infertility clinic are lined with babyheads. Thousands and thousands of babyheads.
Read More
IN THE SHADOW OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM By Kayo Chang Black
When I was 18, I crashed my car for the third time. My mother shook her head and said, “I should have listened to the fortune teller. He did tell me not to let you drive."
Read More
Contagion by Mary Mandeville
Before, we knew where he was. This time, birth mom also had no idea; he’d run away from us all.
Read More
High Mom by Danielle Privitera
When my son is old enough, he won’t care, because it saved our family.
Read More
Cannibal by Jennifer Sinor
I am eating myself, slowly, from the outside in. Salted skin and blood.
Read More
Shock, Honey by Megan Goss
Mother tries to talk, to reassure her eighteen-month-old daughter, but she can’t get her voice loud enough. Baby’s wails keep cutting out.
Read More
Siento By Sarah Capdeville
I forgot, when it came down to it, that I existed.
Read More