Rosalind Kaplan

Dancing with Death My dress is bright red. It is Lycra, shiny, its bodice clinging close to my upper body. The skirt, though not tight, is too short for my comfort and ends in a handkerchief hemline. When I twirl it flares out dramatically. Underneath the skirt I wear black fishnet pantyhose. My shoes are…

Esther Lupescu

The Story I Need To Tell Now I got voice mail from a woman on the West Coast named Celestina. She was calling to discuss a medical issue, she said. I’d met her just once, years earlier, when she and her husband Walter were in New York to collect a prize for their joint translation…

Judy Bolton-Fasman

The Hamsa Blues I often dream I am ambling through the rooms of my childhood home. The air is a sepia color, and particles of dust swirl around me until I cannot catch my breath. I know the water stains on the ceilings so well. They are Rorschach tests of plumbing disasters that my mother…

Monterica Sadé Neil

You’re My Sister In the seventh grade, my best friend, Jade, and I watched pornos at her father’s while he and her stepmother were sleeping. I don’t think we ever called it porno though. We watched flicks. Growing up in Memphis, Tennessee that’s what we’d heard. Flicks. Heard it mostly from older boys and men…

Kyle Mills

Delineation of Bigwater In the canon of traditional Appalachian music, there is a haunting old time fiddle arrangement known as the “Yew Piney Mountains.” It is likely that no one ever actually composed this tune, but rather, it materialized out of the mountain culture itself- slowly evolving with each generation that played the song. The…

Kathleen Minor

Brief Notes on American Heroes April 29, 2021 As I left my old college campus today, I got to thinking about the last time I’d made that drive in March of 2020, before I really knew who John Lewis was and before “pandemic,” had reshaped the everyday lexicon of American English. I was there to…

Jory Pomeranz

Seasons of Suicide “When someone seeks,” said Siddhartha, “then it easily happens that his eyes see only the thing that he seeks, and he is able to find nothing, to take in nothing because he always thinks only about the thing he is seeking, because he has one goal, because he is obsessed with his…

Mary Mandeville

ASSIGNED SHAME AT BIRTH I stand before my full-length bathroom mirror before donning the day’s needed costume. Doesn’t matter if I’ll put on workout tights, jog bra and t-shirt for walking dogs or taking a local hike, or whether I dress in floral tights, a skirt, sweater and sensible but cute shoes for seeing clients,…

Elizabeth Jane Kert

A BIRTHDAY DUET I had been waiting for the other shoe to drop since September 2014 when my 21-year-old son went AWOL from residential treatment in North Carolina. Max had unraveled about a year earlier as a college freshman in Olympia — a result of copious amounts of alcohol, various recreational drugs, mania, and complete…