At The 4th Of July Potluck The Year She Moves Back Home I suck the marrow from the chicken leg, slurp the devil from its eggs, swill it down with the good beer then make room for a sheet cake slice the size of a house shingle. All this while other ladies skirt the table,… Read More Micro Prose: At The 4th Of July Potluck The Year She Moves Back Home by Amanda Bales
Southern Hostess I hadn’t expected to get dumped. Especially while naked. Dumping a lover who lay beside you naked had to be about the lowest thing you could choose to do to somebody. The evenings Grandy hadn’t called, I wore T-shirts with Daffy Duck on them, pants with elastic waistbands, and my hair scraped back… Read More Micro Prose: Southern Hostess by Shoshauna Shy
I Had Three Daughters The first one did not survive the night. I birthed her on the beach below our house, the lighthouse around the bay illuminating our loss in syncopated minutes as it flicked across conjoined flesh, ticking down the breaths and making the blood look brighter than it would in the morning light.… Read More Micro Prose: I Had Three Daughters by Andrew F. Sullivan
Egg Babies Easily Broken At school, they give us eggs and say they’re our babies now. The boys laugh and shuffle their feet and the girls nod intently, lips in firm lines. You cup your egg in your hands, hold it up to the side of your face. We should get married, you say to… Read More Micro Prose: Egg Babies Easily Broken by Cathy Ulrich
by Anna Sandy-Elrod Books These are in no particular order. The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead When I heard that Colson Whitehead had written a book about American slavery in which the metaphorical Underground Railroad was turned into a physical, working railway for slaves to escape to freedom, I had to buy it for the… Read More Best Consumption of 2018
by Jessica Lynn Suchon “Memory’s Looming Furnace”: The Traumatic Entrapment of Elisa Karbin’s Snare The word snare requires a reader to assign it a definition as either noun or verb, either a mechanism that captures or the act of catching. Elisa Karbin’s debut chapbook of the same name is self-aware, a living consciousness—both noun and verb, the unbearable… Read More Review | Elisa Karbin’s Snare
by Aaron Bristow-Rodriguez Martin Ott’s third book of poetry, Lessons in Camouflage, explores violence in public and private spaces through a haunting variety of open and closed poetic forms. Tragic and personal, the collection ultimately delivers a message of hope and recovery. The collection opens with “King of Camouflage,” a tightly packed poem that conflates theater and war.… Read More Review | Martin Ott’s Lessons in Camouflage
If, as a student, you read a famous essayist’s work, and it is immediately accessible and seems like something you might be able to write yourself, it’s galvanizing. Constraints are great for art. So are deadlines. But even better is to legitimately say to yourself, “Really? That’s a great essay? Well, shit, I can do that.”… Read More In Which Hundreds Of People Chronicle What Happened On June 21, 2018 And I Read All Of It
Big Bad Wolf The tickets Mom handed the turnstile lady were clipped from boxes of cola Dad started buying after his accident. “Everything costs money except the rides,” Dad said, adjusting his mesh hat. We walked around the other families on vacation, and I watched them, the other parents, to see if we were being… Read More Micro Prose: Big Bad Wolf by Terrance Wedin
Rent Miki had told Tê the piano was haunted. Miki could hear it in the reverberation behind the low keys and the strident leftover in the highs. But Tê knew nothing about pianos. She opened its cover and exposed the keys. It grinned like a dog. She pressed down, her ten fingers stretched apart. It sounded sinister, she gave Miki that. Jason left with the rent money. They had agreed on a deposit, but the day he moved in (that strawberry blonde hair, that pointy nose, that collar neatly tucked into his cardigan), asking had seemed rude, and unnecessary. And there was the piano. Tê had never thought she would live with a piano. Now it sat underneath a pile of unpaid utility bills. Tê stuck her fingers under its jaw, leaned back and put the weight of her body into the pull. It didn’t move. Later she found out Jason had told Miki the piano belonged to his dead aunt. He claimed she had gone mad after a failed love affair with a married man. Supposedly, he had loved her, but he was related to royalty and could not face the scandal of leaving his wife. Jason’s aunt had played their song until her fingers bled and became deformed with calluses. She drank poison and kept playing until her dead torso fell… Read More Micro Prose: Rent by Ananda Lima
