Awards 45
Fall/Winter 2023
Vol 67, No. 1
Editor’s Note: Eilis O’Neal
Fiction
Carol Dines: “On Ice”
Dashka Slater: “The Ruddy Fruits That Still Remain”
Kyoko Uchida: “Skin”
Nahal Suzanne Jamir: “There Is No Act Five Monologue”
Alex McWalters: “Jimmy-Jim-James”
Miriam Ho Nga Wai: “Miss Ng Misadventures”
Benjamin Van Voorhis: “Chernobyl Dogs”
Poetry
Jeevan Anthony Narney: “An Adoptee Abecedarian,” “I Could Have Been a Teaboy in Bangalore,” “Family Studies,” “Family Reunion,” “Taking a Break from Being a Hypochondriac”
Diana Cao: “Sick Days: Sonnet Corona”
Liz Harms: “Inquest on Carolina Petrovitis, Case No. 234-3-1916”
Melanie Tafejian: “Blockade,” “Volunteers Visit the Artsakh Border,” “Water,” “Phantom Babies,” “Walnut Jam”
Samuel Ugbechie: “Something like home”
Mickey Kennedy: “Painted Lady,” “Rewiring the Chandelier,” “Barnfall,” “The Gamble, 1992,” “Rods and Cones”
Cynthia Marie Hoffman: “Shells”
Ellen Zhang: “Tentative”
Fay Dillof: “The Art of”
Katherine Gaffney: “Hunger Winter,” “Onion,” “On Learning that the Ford Motor Company Asked Mariannr Moore to Name a New Vehicle”
Dante Di Stefano: “While I was Talking to My Friends the Poets”
Kristin Davis: “The Other End of Poetry,” “Bitterroot,” “IV. Margin Notes,” “In My Willowbrook Dreams,” “Fish Ladder at Damariscotta”
Amanda Maret Scharf: “First Language,” “Family Album,” “Queens”
Jackie Chicalese: “Ghost Walk”
Elina Katrin: “Base of Fire,” “November as Still Life”
Rosa Castellano: “Survival is Plural,” “A Girl the Color of a House on Fire Is Stuck Where It’s Always Necks Out”
Hannah V Warren: “A poem in which I can’t find a suitable metaphor”
Laura Apol: “Honor”
Juniper Bea Gilbert: “The Pieta”
Allison Field Bell: “What Could Belong to Us,” “Paros”
Gordon Taylor: “Replicant”
Callista Buchen: “Loon or Cormorant,” “Plane Sewing, Wright Company Factory, 1911”
David Moolten: “Dam,” “Practical Nightmare”
Tamara Panici: “Poem in Two Tongues,” “The Dead, in a Field in our Country, The Dead”
Andrew Payton: “Lancehead & Opossum,” “Surveying,” “The Rider’s Coda,” “To Be by Oath Enjoined to This”
John Blair: “Aphorism 15: A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words,” “Aphorism 65: A Greedy Father Has Thieves for Children,” “Aphorism 58: The Truth Is a Burden That Few Care to Carry,” “Aphorism 33: All Things Come to Those Who Wait”
Susan Cohen: “Disguised as Air”
Beth Oast Williams: “Sagittarius puts down his bow”
Susan Nisenbaum Becker: “Hard,” “Then,” “Map,” “Thursday,”
Rewa Zeinati: “I should be writing instead of watching endless episodes of Arabic series on Shahid”
Rasaq Malik: “Hunger,” “Maiduguri”
Kyoko Uchida: “Concertina,” “Salah Eddin Street,” “Repair”
Pamela Wax: “Monsterworter I Know, Though I May Never Visit Germany”
Quinton Okoro: “two children pray while kneeling behind a lemon tree in their father’s backyard. their fingers are still sticky”
Bailey Blumenstock: “Migraine”
Mary B. Moore: “The Wasp’s Song”
Lex Orgera: “Taking into Account the Gods”
Laura Isabele Amsel: “Singing Goats of Dauphin Island”
Body Language
Spring/Summer 2023, Vol 66, No. 2
Editor’s Note: Ellis O’Neal
Prose
Jeffrey Xiong: “The Life Cycle of Stars”
Laura Schmitt: “Runaway Nation”
Grace Spulak: “Almost Autofiction”
Melissa Darcey Hall: “The Opposite of Instinct”
Emily Stoddard: “Our Kaleidoscope”
Tammy Armstrong: “News from the Interior”
Aleksia Silverman: “Listen, Everything Is Fine”
Poetry
Felicia Zamora: “Sonnet to Break the Crown of Invisibility”
Benjamin Grossberg: “Or Had They Let Me Choose”
K Janeschek: “Spring Equinox,” “In This Hour of Sun,” “So Come with Me Instead
Jennifer Richter: “I Feel You,” “Shout-Out to the Little Girl Bear-Walking Through TSA Security”
Julie E. Bloemeke: “When the Leaves Come to Hide Me in Late Spring I Climb,” “West Village”
Elizabeth Ann Robertson: “Remedy,” “Winterkill”
Teresa Scollon: “The Body Is a Prayer That Opens”
Doug Ramspeck: “Gift Bones,” “Boys of Death”
K.T. Landon: “I Have Five Tattoos”
Rebecca Martin: “In the Hall of the Universe,” “Grapheme”
Riley O’Mearns: “Ode After the Gel Manicure”
Haley Bosse: “Consecration”
Annie Wenstrup: “Palimpsest,” “Self-Portrait as Pareidolia”
Darlene Anita Scott: “A History of Feet: An After-Action Report”
Julia Wendell: “For Luck”
Lucy Griffith: “I Took My Scars for a Walk”
Hallie Chametzky: “On Becoming a Cherry Pit the Day of the Dobbs
Decision,” “Dance Making”
Traci Brimhall: “Lacrimosa,” Entomotherapy”
Genevieve De Guzman: “Morituri te Salutant,” “Woman as Ouroboros”
Kelly Weber: “Ode to His Knife Collection”
Maria Dylan Himmelman: “Anything Can and Will Happen,” “The Concorde,” “And Finally, My Memoir”
Susan Varnot: “Distance by Undertow”
Noah Davis: “Trout Heart”
Rebecca Baggett: “First”
Jed Myers: “Recipe,” “To an Old Physical Anthropologist Friend in the Metastic Realm”
John-Michael Bloomquist: “Pozole”
Benjamin Faro: “Party of One and Many”
Anna Leigh Knowles: “Cooking Lessons”
Jac-Lynn Stark: “Ode to a Pleomorphic Adenoma”
David Faldet: Secret; “Condiments”
Polley Poer: “My Dad Just Saved Your Life Tonight”
Shannon Moran: “Prevention’s Ultimate Guide to the Female Body”
Arah Ko: “Origin of the Fear”
Anna Tomlinson: “Undiagnosis,” “Fourth of July at Jay’s”
Zuleyha Ozturk Lasky: “Cherry,” “Ghazal”
Julia Lisella: “Tender”
Rachel Rinehart: “Abishag on OnlyFans,” “Obol for Mrs. O’Day”
Karthik Sethuraman: “Palinode,” “Departure”
Jennifer Perrine: “Portrait of My Mother on Her Green Card,” “Ashes”
Maya Nordine: “Brown, Maybe Hazel”
Angela Kirby: “Pareidolia 61: Redacted”
Sam Robison: “Roadkill on the Shoulder of Calving Season,” “Dog and Coyote,” “Wildflowers”
Anita Sullivan: “Waiting for Borage”
Ellen Kaufman: “Laps; “Broken Water”
Susan Kress: “Against the Wall,” “Breathe,” “Stephen Dunn, His Mother, and Me Too”
Leslie Jill Patterson: “If Your Heart Is Empty, I will Fill It for You,” “Swim Lessons”
Vasvi Kejriwal: “Elegy for My Father (Disguised as an Ode to My Pockmarked Skin)”
Karan Kapoor: “Sore Throat”
Claudia F. Saleeby Savage: “Slip of Light”
Kathleen Kimball-Baker: “Expert Witness: A Poet Distills the Turning Point Testimony
In the Trial for the Murder of George Perry Floyd”
John Blair: “O Dearest Little Burning”
Melissa McKinstry: “Sorrow Chaser,” “Periodic Syntax”
Lisa Rhoades: “Sick at Heart,” “What Do You Need?”
Anthony Immergluck: “Burden of Care,” “Better”
Donna Sprujit-Metz: “Sarah Returns to Me as a Fleeting Image of Her Left Wrist Accessorized with Rubber Bands”
Natalia Conte: “It’s Adam and Eve, Not Florence and the Machine!”
Allen Means: “Gender/Sex (Please, Sign Here),” “My Hands Wish to Escape from This Body”
Danielle Cadena Deulen: “A Series Person”
Elaine Johanson: “Pomegranate, Past Ripe,” “Other Living Things”
Eunice Cho: “The Art of Lifts and Turns”
Will Dennis: “Pater Familia,” “Waiting in the 7-11 Parking Lot”
Hannah Craig: “Solstice”
Cory Brown: “What I’d Thought,” “To Live”
Alice Templeton: “At Harbin Hot Springs,” “Laying on the Horn,” “Yoga for Perpetual Beginners”
Past Issues
Awards 44
Fall/Winter 2022, Vol. 66, No. 1
Editor’s Note: Eilis O’Neal
Fiction
Treena Thibodeau: “My Mother Says This House is Haunted”
Ellen Rhudy: “You Women in the Mountains”
Marguerite Alley: “Water Diviners”
James Janko: “The Wire-Walker”
Poetry
Lory Bedikian: “Ode to Their Leaving,” “Meditation on Fractured Vertebrae,” “If only he had written his refugee song,” “Theorizing Vahan’s Departure”
Angela Kirby: “Pareidolia 175”
Teresa Scollon: “Asthma Attack,” “Geopolitics, Stateside,” “Meanwhile,” “Stolen Code”
Greg Nicholl: “Sage,” “Charnel House,” “Gross Anatomy,” “Selective Hearing”
Hannah Whiteman: “The Law of the Conservation of Energy Says Not a Bit of You is Gone”
Kyoko Uchida: “Hiroshima, 7:21 A.M. ,” “Hanoi,” “In Visibility,” “If You”
Julia McDaniel: “A Charted Territory”
Kelly Grace Thomas: “Female Lobsters Grow More Fertile With Age”
Jessica Pierce: “I want to speak all of the springtime”
Susan Landgraf: “Bindweed”
Donte Collins: “Ombrophobia”
Janee J. Baugher: “Andrew Wyeth’s Footnotes to Self-Portrait, 1938,” “Andrew Wyeth’s Footnotes to Mill Buildings, 1959,” “Andrew Wyeth’s Footnotes to Frosted Apples, 1967,” “Andrew Wyeth’s Footnotes to Airborne, 1996
Wen Lim: “2006, The Year Mom Learnt to Bake Jim Lahey’s No-Knead Bread”
Susan Rich: “The Blind Ones”
Joanna Currey: “Coming Out Vigil,” “Ordinary Grief,” “April Begins with Judas”
Johnathan Fink: “Leonardo’s Mistake”
Lauren Coggins: “Reminders”
Amelia L. Williams: “Beautiful Death,” “DIY Repairs”
A.D. Lauren-Abunassar: “Supplies for a Quick Migration,” “The Visitors,” “On Counting the Days”
Andrew Hemmert: “To Live on Mars,” “Like the Points of Compass Needles”
Anna Scotti: “Kanawha Street”
Catherine Stearns: “Desiderium,” “Winter,” “Shagbark”
Mara Lee Grayson: “May We All Emerge One Day as Butterflies in Poems”
Emily Kingery: “On Virtue,” “An Apology,” “Mistrust,” “Snapdragons”
Melody Wilson: “Tightrope”
Darius Simpson: “Lessons Learned on a Slow Drive East”
M. Soledad Caballero: “The Mirage”
Justin Hunt: “At the Missouri Pacific Depot, Where, in 1931, You Holed up for Three Days and Drank”
Laura Apol: “Twins,” “Opening the Field,” “Afterlife,” “Is Touch”
Anna Claire Hodge: “Sephora During the Cancer Scare”
Jana-Lee Germaine: “Distance”
Ivy Raff: “You Learned to Wait”
Anne Casey: “Season of Samhain”
Rosa Lane: “Dear Master”
Leah Claire Kaminski: “To the mother in Corsica who in April 2000 made me call my mother on the pay phone”
What Now?: The Future We Make
Spring/Summer 2022, Vol. 65, No. 2
Editor’s Note: Eilis O’Neal
Amelia L. Williams: “We say stay safe, be well—; Overwintering; Inclusion Criteria; Spring Morning Without Cream”
Lorna Crozier: “Four Ways to Keep on Going; Three Ways to Keep on Going; Two Ways to Keep on Going”
Krystyna Dabrowska: “Gdy to sie skonczy (When it’s Over); Rozpaczulga (Sorrowbalm)”
Lauren Camp: “Rocky Ground; Living Room”
Cristina J. Baptista: “Breath; The Annunciation”
Tim Raymond: “The River”
Tennessee Hill: “A Lifetime Trapped in Peach Brine”
Ginny Threefoot: “In Paradise: As Honey Is Our Nature; In Paradise: With Wildness and Anticipation”
Susan Azar Porterfield: “A Thing or Two About Illness”
Kailey Tedesco: “shelter / a whole world made of plastic”
Hannah Smith: “Pipeline Failure: Sweetwater, Texas; A Study in How to Turn; A Spectacle in Hill Country”
Oksana Maksymchuk: “Birdwatchress”
Scott Lowery: “Conceptual Sonogram”
Joel Peckham: “Twist Again; Still Running; This Year’s Child”
Jacqueline Guidry: “Almost There”
Kim Garcia: “How to Begin Again”
David Troupes: “The Pastime of an Idle Evening”
Lucyna Prostko: “The Act of Leaving; House of Wandering”
Suzanne Manizza Roszak: “Herbalism”
Stephanie Niu: “Anti-Resolutions to Protect Yourself in the New Year”
Fatima Jafar: “On Desire”
Dante Novario: “Unhaunted”
Geoff Anderson: “What Becomes Memory”
Katherine Fallon: “Willing Risk; Ponderosa”
Charles Grosel: “Dunkin’ Donuts”
Lauren Coggins: “Plonk”
Molly Sutton Kiefer: “Silphidae: Carrion Beetle”
Sarah Wetzel: “I would like to ask Eurydice; Pandemic, ending with a promise; Salvage”
N.Y. Ling: “Epiphanies on the Cross River Gorillas”
Crystal Cox: “2062”
Amy Wang: “sear; beating hearts; swallow-boned”
Jayden A. McClam: “what i meant when i said i forgot i’m a lesbian”
Matthew Olive: “Abandoned Baths (Amyl Nitrite)”
Cady Favazzo: “The Disappearance of Imani”
Lisa Wartenberg: “What is Ours”
Erin Evans: “Bird Song; Dear Life; Perennials; In Patient; Chickadee; Acceptance”
Awards 43
Fall/Winter 2021, Vol. 65, No. 1
Editor’s Note: Eilis O’Neal
Fiction
Celine Aenlle-Rocha: “White Black People”
Paula Closson Buck: “The Inventories”
Edvin Subašić: “Thug”
Rachel Reeher: “God Is in Your Body”
Jennifer Blackman: “Wife of; or, What Does It Mean to Be Haunted?”
Rachel Furey: “A Dolphin in Pain”
Teresa Milbrodt: “The Southern Part of the State”
Poetry
Emily Rose Cole: “Unblues #2,” “The Miss Sally Sonnets,” “In the midst of the outbreak, I think of my mother,” “In the midst of the outbreak, I develop a burial plan,” “Spell for Patience”
Julie Marie Wade: “/NOW/”
Sandra Fees: “On the Consolatory Pleasure of Jigsaws”
Apol: “Vanishing Point,” “Stigmata,” “Gift,” “Spectral”
Caroline Earleywine: “When I Think of Parenthood,” “Bible Belt Gay,” “Ode to my Wife’s Gender,” “Broken Ghazal”
Kyoko Uchida: “And Love,” “Quarantine,” “Detour,” “Winter”
John Blair: “Eclogue 18: The House that’s Not the End of the World,” “Eclogue 5: Beautiful Words Are Not the Truth”
Francesca Bell: “Some Were Weary with Their Edges Worn Out,” “Quarry,” “Like a Friend,” “Learning to Love the World that Is”
Angela Sucich: “Match Game,” “Oracle,” “Everything I Love I Want to Consume,” “The Snow Child”
Kate Kingston: “Whiteout,” “Ordinary Day,” “After My Brother’s Memorial”
Corrinne Clegg Hales: “Silent Stroke”
Sunu P. Chandy: “Practice raking leaves or sweeping to remind oneself of the feeling of engaging in work that knows no end”
Adrie Rose: “I will make a study—again—,” “Separation,” “Swaddle,” “Every Villain Is the Hero of Their Own Story”
Jessica Pierce: “Some comfort,” “Finding my copy of The Children’s Book of Saints,” “To donate: to make a gift of,” “Talking about Buddhism with teenagers”
Carolyn Oliver : “In Another Life, You Live,” Eve and Bridget Bishop Whisper on Gallows Hill,” “Night Ocean”
Rachel Edelman: “No matter, my treads are lined with Kevlar”
Zack Lesmeister: “On the Lineage of Survival; a Series of Exit Strategies,” “Birds of Prey”
Liz Marlow: “The Last Rosh Hashanah in Treblinka,” “Thunderstorm”
Mara Adamitz Scrupe: “an episode in archaeology/ a scar,” “Field work/ Cass County 1938,” “Jump”
Kathleen Holliday: “In a Monastery Garden”
William Snyder: “Mas at Saintes Maries de la Mer”
Richard Robbins: “The Oratory of All Souls”
Connor Yeck: “Hold for Release till End of the World Confirmed,” “The Walk-Back”
Christina Hutchins: “Thwaites Glacier,” “String Theory,” “All We Could Do Was Laugh”
Sally Lipton Derringer: “Target”
Amy Miller: “Doing Laundry for a Friend,” “First Masks,” “Linda Vista”
Gail Rudd Entrekin: “Wind,” “The Current that Language Makes Visible”
Cynthia White: “Ode to the Wandering Womb,” “Tongue”
Dan Albergotti: “Tongue & Torque,” “Inscription in the Wake”
Siew David Hii: “help—my brother is a fascist”
Anthony Thomas Lombardi: “Ruinenlust”
John McCarthy: “The Little Egypt Dive Bar Elegy”
Harley Anastasia Chapman: “When I Say My Father Is Homeless, I Mean,” “In the Nightmare,” “The Shape of Animal”
Endings and Beginnings
Spring Summer 2021, Vol. 64, No. 2
Editor’s Notes: Eilis O’Neal
Fiction
Sruthi Narayanan: “A Meal For Violets”
Andrew Gretes: “The Phenomenology of Sex Dolls”
Titus Chalk” “. -..- -.-. …. .- -. –. .”
Michael Nye: “Under Bright Iowa Lights”
Jemimah Wei: “Bleach”
Creative Nonfiction
Kirsten L. Parkinson: “The Family Cremains”
Katie Culligan “What the X-Ray Sees”
Poetry
Daniel Lusk: “Overture: A Poem before Eden“
Suzie Eckl: “Gussie Remembers Winter in Circle City,” “Gussie With Her Sisters on the Winter Solstice,”“Gussie Goes to the Diggings I,” “Gussie Goes to the Diggings II”
Magpie Miller: “Plesiosaurus Josephii,” “Type Specimen,” “The Last Time We Quarreled”
Christen Noel Kauffman: “How Gods Are Made,” “Imagine How They Sound”
David Faldet: “Millennium”
Rilla Askew: “A Beginning to the End of Silence”
Alex Simões: “trans formas são”/”trans form action”
Anna Lowe Weber: “Another Fish Has Died”
Gabriel Spera: “The Endlings, “Hummingbird Nest,” “After Fire and Rain”
Chelsea Wagenaar: “Ensoulment“
Sammy Greenspan: “I am carving a dragon boat to carry you to the other side”
John Moessner: “Memory with Duplicate Keys and Flowers”
Richard K. Kent: “Secret Passage,“ “Blue Shed, Ohio”
Grant Clauser: “Life List”
John A. Nieves: “Linguistics”
Michael T. Lawson: “Death as an Inadequate Metaphor for the Absorbing State of a Markov Chain”
Chelsea Bayouth: “A Woman Who Loved My Uncle”
Jack Stewart: Renoir’s Young Woman Arranging an Earring”
Emma Aylor: “False Spring,” “Dislocation”
Mary Ann Hudson: “Wortcunner”
Carol Guess & Rochelle Hurt: “Nonwife: 2020”
Jane Zwart: “The Conclusions”
Rebecca Lehmann: “Cabin”
Josh Luckenbach: “After the Quarantine Ends”
Trevor Moffa: “Fried Dough,” “On the Accrual of Vacation Days”
Russell Brakefield: “The Fiberglass Man”
Pam Baggett: “Foundations,” “Above the Bones”
Jesse Wallis: “Last Man Standing”
Adam Chiles: “Clearing out my Father’s Studio”
Ronda Piszk Broatch: “Giving You Away in Pieces”
Mamie Morgan: “Everyone I’ve Danced with is Dead.”
Jasmine Elizabeth Smith” [Jim Imagines He & Charley Patton Pick a Boweavil from Backyard Chicago Crop]”
Hari B Khalsa: “Ode (more like a rant) to whatever is going to happen next”
Kira Trainor: “Stones to Sink the Cradle,” “Fragments of a Constellation”
Anne Pierson Wiese: “Dust”
Bethany Schultz Hurst: “Afterlife: Abandoned Mall”
Elinor Ann Walker: “Kaze No Denwa,” “For Emma, Wherever We May Find Her”
Jan Clausen: “Lines Written After Equinox,” “Objective Narration”
River Elizabeth Hall: “Not the Red”
Angela Sucich: “Start at the Beginning”
Dag T. Straumsvåg: “Den Mystiske Vegen””/Mystery Road”
Barry Sternlieb: “’rain suRgery’”
Sarah Carleton: “The Unmooring”
Katie Hartsock: “Trying,”
Sue Ellen Thompson: “London Wedding”
Christine Degenaars: “Missing My Mother in Jersey, 22 Miles Away”
Kendra L. Vanderlip: “I Go Home to Watch My Father Die While Space Junk Threatens My Home State”
John Leonard: “Raking Sand, Mid-Omen”
Awards 42
Fall/Winter 2020, Vol. 64, No. 1
Fiction
Mohit Manohar: “This Has Not Been Enough”
Gage Saylor: “Jailbird”
Gracie Newman: “Initial Consultations”
Hayley Lynch: “The Tremendous Machine”
Carol Dines: “Grace’s Mask”
Jean Ferruzola: “Burn Brightly and Rise”
Jessi Phillips: “Anything You Ask Me To”
Poetry
Rebecca Foust: “Blackout,” “Sit with Me”
Janine Certo: “The Poet Asks, What Prevents You from Loving Yourself?,” “Ode to Pizza,” “My dog is depressed,” “Dear Australia,” “After Hearing from Contacts Quarantined in Italy, You Warn U.S. Family and Friends,” “Home Altar in the Year of a Pandemic”
Shannon Austin: “Dollhood”
Frances Richey: “Skin,” “Bloody Mingo County,” “Inside the Mountain”
James Wyshynski: “Counting Out the Cost,” “Calling the Dead Out,” “Macy’s Book Department,”
Alice Templeton: “Matinee,” “Youth Sermon,” “Elegy for the Horses,” “For the Body,” “To Lost Time”
Marissa Davis: “Demeter & Child”
Emily Van Kley: “Affidavit for Self-Care & Other Questionable Ephemera,” “Spring,” “Bouquet”
Susan Landgraf: “One Day of Juxtapositions”
Lauren Coggins: “Eating Light”
Jehanne Dubrow: “Metamorphoses”
Benjamin Gucciardi: “I Ask My Sister’s Ghost to Write Her Own Elegy,” “Little Accents”
Yvonne Amey: “In Memoriam W. C. on the L Line into Downtown Sydney During the COVID-19 Pandemic,” “Bad Brains, a Woke Mosh Pit, and a D.C. Haiku”
Sean Reynolds: “The Year My Voice Began to Crack,” “The Last Frog in the World”
Bernard Ferguson: “origin story”
Yasmine Ameli: “Naz Kardan,” “I Resurrect Myself with an Eight-Quart Pot”
Karen Kovacik: “Hook and Eye,” “Farsickness”
Amy Miller: “The Church of the Hair Salon,” “Invitation to the Dead”
Darius Simpson: “Yea I Did It,” “Seventy-Two Hours”
Imani Cezanne: “No Crowns Allowed Through TSA”
Oak Morse: “Sashay”
Jubi Arriola-Headley: “Invitation,” “Peacocking,” “Big Apple”
Jessica Pierce: “After reading Hemingway and Kafka while alone in my Kolkata apartment, I pour another glass of Blue Riband gin,” “And still,” “We all have our work to do,” “Especially When I’m Afraid”
A.D. Lauren-Abunassar: “Victim Impact Statement,” “Poem that starts with the sound of Andy Warhol eating a cheeseburger,” “Monologue or Party Trick,” “Dream in Which My Body Is a Snowstorm”
Caroline M. Mar: “Certainty,” “Burials,” “Tragedy,” “Mythology”
Theresa Q. Tran: “Shuck,” “First Fruit,” “Mercy”
Amie Whittemore: “Self-Portrait as Smartphone,” “Self-Portrait as Snow Day,” “Self-Portrait as Most Glorious”
John Walser: “Give yourself over to the trees, to the sun”
Jeanne Wagner: “Backyard Birds,” “Speaking in Tongues,” “Eschatology”
Kathleen Michael: “Cowbird”
John Blair: “Seeking Dr. Einstein,” “In the Tin Factory,” “On the Perseid Meteor Shower as a Metaphor for Joy”
Wendy Scott: “A Carpet of Lights”
W.J. Herbert: “The Latin Lesson”
Anthony Immergluck: “Matryoshka”
Chuck Carlise: “This Is Mathematics,” “Solana”
Youssef Helmi: “Scarf,” “poem w/ kept promises”
Marsha Truman Cooper: “The Rapture of Bees”
Gail Newman: “Two Men Talking”
Jana-Lee Germaine: “Learning Curve”
Diane Beck: “History of Winter”
Tyler Dunston: “8 lines in the Grace Church garden,” “Boeotian Variations”
Richard Michelson: “A Horse-Cure,” “Life Sentence,” “What My Mother Remembers—Memorial Day,” “I Create as I Speak,” “What My Mother Remembers—New Year’s Day,” “My dying is not tragic,” “Lucky,” “Unveiling”
Words on Play
Spring/Summer 2020, Vol. 63. No. 2
Fiction
Jackson Ingram: “The Marmee Dress”
Alison Ho: “Ars Poetica”
Gauraa Shekhar: “Other Significant Others: A Glossary”
Sean Bernard: “I Want My M.F.A.”
Creative Nonfiction
JJ Peña: “the truth behind killing monsters”
Poetry
James Toupin: “The Discovery of Play”
Holly Painter: “Cryptic Crossword L,” “Cryptic Crossword LVI”
Gabriel Spera: “WORD SEARCH: Chemotherapy”
Amy Miller: “After the Concert,” “What We Laugh At”
Ioanna Carlsen: “On the Miniature Pumpkins You Hid Through the House”
Myra Shapiro: “Dearth,” “The Letter d”
Clemonce Heard: “The Gospel of Wheelie,” “Washington Parish Free Fair”
Liz Ahl: “Home Game,” “Amnesia at the Cash Tables”
Sarah Ebba Hansen: “A Year After the Breakup,” “The Part I’ll Never Do Again,” “An Elegy in April,” “Moss Hollow”
Mary Kovaleski Byrnes: “My Kids in Church,” “Diptych with Daughter/Mermaid”
Joanna Gordon: “Fish-Girl Fragments,” “If Fish-Girls Could Dance,” “Halve the Fish—Save the Woman”
Edwina Trentham: “My mother rebukes me from the turquoise depths”
Michelle Penn: “The surfers,” “a history of paper clips in Paris,” “Self-Portrait in Multiple Universes”
Wendy Drexler: “The Bay, Shimmering the Whole Way Out”
Amelia L. Williams: “The Catch”
James Davis: “As,” “Ex”
Markham Johnson: “At the Track, Waiting for Jesus,” “Longhorns”
Matthew J. Spireng: “The Perfect Game”
George Looney: “Music Retrieved,” “On the Eaves of the House Next Door”
Patrick Kindig: “what they don’t tell you about dido & aeneas,” “enchant, v.,” “title poem”
Ann Keniston: “Self-Portrait as Off Rhyme”
John Harris: “On Nick Cave’s ‘Soundsuits’”
Ellen Kombiyil: “The Last Joyride”
Alice Duggan: “The Trouble with Cars,” “I Visit Lois at the Nursing Home”
Margot Kahn: “Skiing up Cold Creek”
Geri Radacsi: “In Times of Abandonment”
Judith Pacht: “Babel”
Cindy Veach: “At the Austerlitz, New York, Blueberry Festival I Buy a Trifold Mirror”
Lynn Domina: “Water Music, 7-17-1717”
Katy Day: “The Death of a Star,” “Snow Angels,” “Variations on Independence”
Marjorie Maddox: “Play Therapy,” “Taboo”
Dorsey Craft: “The Pirate Anne Bonny and I Play Video Games,” “The Pirate Anne Bonny and I Plunder the Cruise Ship,” “Heaven”
Joanna Currey: “Easter Even,” “Somerset Olde Creek Pool & Rec. Center”
Tara Mesalik MacMahon: “In the Old Neighborhood”
Janet Jennings: “Riding with Ken,” “Calling the Colors,” “Names Are a Difficult Matter”
Brooke Sahni: “What My Mother Knows,” “The Golden Reserve”
Heidi Seaborn: “On the Occasion of an Outfielder’s Wedding”
Daniel Becker: “The Incomplete Sentence of Baseball”
Madeline Grigg: “Burned House Horizon,” “Shape Shifter,” “The Goddess Hel Sits on Her Front Porch,” “Ephemeris”
Ella Flores: “Pyrocumulus,” “Indo-Australian Tectonic Plate Decides It’s Not Working Out, Breaks Up,” “South American Plate Plays on Words,” “Nubian Tectonic Plate Finds Animatronic Fortuneteller, Inserts Coin,” “Invented Language / Sextina”
Alice Templeton: “Nostalgia,” “Trellis”
Laura Glenn: “Holiday Parties”
Jean-Mark Sens: “Croquet”
Anita Sullivan: “Preposition”
Barbara Schwartz: “The Empress,” “Counting Blessings”
Devon Miller-Duggan: “For Mercy”
Cindy Juyoung Ok: “Pale Music”
Marisa P. Clark: “Yet Another Love Poem in Which I Anthromorphize”
Nicholas Yingling: “The Limits of Magic”
Max Heinegg: “Blueberrying”
Virtual Readings: Words on Play
Joanna Currey
“Easter Even”: https://vimeo.com/403111689
“Somerset Olde Creek Pool & Rec. Center”: https://vimeo.com/405072407
Michelle Penn
“The surfers”: https://vimeo.com/user112183595/review/405390164/c452951e6d
“Self-Portrait in Multiple Universes”: https://vimeo.com/user112183595/review/405389590/7c60c90f20
“A history of paper clips in Paris”: https://vimeo.com/user112183595/review/405389153/cf81188d48
Amelia Williams
“The Catch”: https://vimeo.com/401925497
Marjorie Maddox
“Play Therapy,” “Taboo”: https://vimeo.com/user110812570/review/400988372/68b60feed4
Dorsey Olbrich
“The Pirate Anne Bonny and I Play Video Games”: https://vimeo.com/user110836210/review/401099099/31e7847026
Max Heinegg
“Blueberrying”: https://vimeo.com/400668403
Gauraa Shekhar
“Other Significant Others: A Glossary” (excerpt):
Amy Miller
“After the Concert,” “What We Laugh At”: https://vimeo.com/401961408?fbclid=IwAR1MtQ7ejR93Jt7lxPfE-SK8lwOW4xA_xB1fONsp0pwd7QRhrdhxSz5ZgqI
Brooke Sahni
“What My Mother Knows,” “The Golden Reserve”: https://vimeo.com/401800518?fbclid=IwAR1bYcelJ5_E9kitGsZSqAmbv1poH_9pklgXebx5JLHZ12dTjb4-3kDuoRs
Patrick Kindig
“what they don’t tell you about dido & aeneas”: https://vimeo.com/401487078?fbclid=IwAR2wN_pz5R3Z0u1W3Ry1K1SKTs-NPECHWnL3Wb2iD_rn5mrO9Ie4vFqWiWI
Liz Ahl
“Home Game”: https://vimeo.com/401146170?fbclid=IwAR0jviMUznBfPQbUYLN2fCpSNeA1Yw6RV-7jzsiGsSFOV__KHfLCkNCoVqM
Markham Johnson
“At the Track, Waiting for Jesus”: https://vimeo.com/user110886525?fbclid=IwAR12bqcNP3fhIqA1cMhRqkRIAjKG78FbVpyysTuxqjBrJ-92HxGDzWVZDq8
Myra Shapiro
“Dearth,” “The letter d”: https://vimeo.com/401090835/2b436a24a3?fbclid=IwAR1hS-COZn7Ijq2Hr7frONzGR27v_xdKK96onzwQi0B9aAW72O0S8D3-Bs8
Ellen Kombiyil
“The Last Joyride”: https://vimeo.com/409837850?fbclid=IwAR25pPVQI3JS0FFwnQD-61GN26-_n50IJt-0LBVbWANPrBUCg3u68LsSt-A
Awards 41
Fall/Winter 2019, Vol. 63. No. 1
Editor’s Note: Eilis O’Neal
Fiction
Jonathan Wei: “Capybara”
John Tait: “This Might Hurt Some”
Elinam Agbo: “Schools of Longing”
Kathleen McNamara, “Pyrosome”
Andrew Mangan, “The Pioneer Spirit”
Elsa Nekola, “Meat Raffle”
Poetry
Robert Thomas: “Negligee and Hatchet: A Sonnet Crown”
Matt Miller: “The Adorned Fathomless Dark Creation,” “Getting Out,” “Boys Beyond June,” “Legend”
Hannah Dow: “Realizations While Staying in Other People’s Apartments,” “My Mother Tries to Teach Me How to Pray,” “Bildungsroman,” “The Seafloor of Your Heart Sings Against It”
Pianta: “Uchinanchu,” “Mother,” “Father Figure”
Eleanor Berry: “Not Burning the Christmas Greens,” “Like Breathing”
Ösel Jessica Plante: “When the Mississippi Speaks with Its Wet, Pretty Mouth” “The Navy Wife Tries on Her Body,” “Pistol of Bones,” “She & Wolf”
A.D. Lauren Abunassar: “Cryptid Poem: “Medium,” “Eavesdropping,” “Autobiography as a Headless Girl”
Kristene Kaye Brown: “Taking the Metro Home After the Wake”
Tori Sharpe: “The Move,” “The Stray”
Kathryn Haemmerle: “Aubade Ending with a View of a River,” “Extraction”
Olivia Yang: “the backyard is where all the grief resides beneath the sun”
Anne McDonnell: “Ash and Metal”
Amanda Gomez: “Autopsy of My Mother”
Michele Randall: “Tea Hot Tea Iced,” “Exigent”
George Looney: “A Falling Piano is a Classic”
Pam Bernard: “Turtle,” “Iphigenia”
Mary Rummel: “Illuminator Dreams”
Stephen Gibson: “On Georgia O’Keefe’s Cow’s Skull with Calico Roses”
Lisa Compo: “Elegy Prelude”
W.J Herbert: “Northern Cardinal,” “The Double Drowning”
Roy Bentley: “The Fighting Lady,” “Bathtub Beach Reef”
Lauren Coggins: “Precedent,” “Speaking with a Friend”
Janine Certo: “Diagram of the Four Chambers of the Heart”
Adam Penna: “The Love Poems That Are Now”
Peter H. Michaels: “Our First Love”
Jeremy Voigt: “Lunar Eclipse”
Christina Hutchins: “Sleeping with the Melvini Sisters,” “The Lover & The Whale”
Catherine Hodges: “Late Afternoon Meditation on an Open Egg Carton”
Laura Apol: “But Winter,” “The Cruelest Month,” “Sowing with Salt,” “Memoir”
Faith Shearin: “Mittens,” “Math,” “Extinct Language”
Joel Peckham: “The Locomotive of the Lord”
James Toupin: “Bird Lives”
Alysse McCanna: “The Salesman,” “Land Run Haibun”
C.C. Reid: “Indelible”
Sara Wagner: “Captivity Narrative”
Gail Newman: “Blood Memory”
Catherine Freeling: “The Glove”
Matthew Gellman: “Not Music,” “Cloudburst,” “Pear Tree, with Thunder”
Ae Hee Lee: “Inside a Mogyoktang in Chicago,” “Fable”
Jo Pitkin: “Village: Bag of Babkas”
Karen Harryman: “Southern Funeral with Hairbrush”
Voices of the Middle East and North Africa
Spring/Summer 2019, Vol. 62. No. 2
Editors’ Note: Eilis O’Neal and Somayeh Shams
Fiction: Voices of the Middle East and North Africa
Uzma Aslam Khan: “My Mother is a Lunar Crater”
Peyman Esmaeili: “Waterworld”
Lauren Alwan: “The Levantines”
Nahid Rachlin: “Teheran Beggar”
Poetry: Voices of the Middle East and North Africa
Myronn Hardy: “Performance Day in the Vaulted Theater,” Blue over Bicycles”
Threa Almontaser: “When I Was Nine I Lived,” “Mining Cave in Dhamar,” “Yemen Storm,” “Yemen Plated with Divine Origami”
Eli Eliahu: “Ballistics,” “Genesis”
Majda Gama: “Tala (Ode to the Girl Palm),” “Passing Twenty-One Palms”
Rachel Neve-Midbar: “Fourth Eden,” “Fajr”
Nurit Zarchi: “[UNTITLED]”
Nashwa Gowanlock: “The Story of Ka”
Aiya Sakr: “In Which Huginn Has Fathered Children,” “Broken Ghazal: Seven Hijabis,” “Questions for my Jinn Counterpart”
Sara Elkamel: “Ways of Entering,” “Welcome to the Night, in Which We Are Hidden”
Dujie Tahat: “salat in a dream with Jida’s ghost on the night of Korryn Gaines’ killing,” “salat in the name of the father”
Makram Ayache: “These Old Jackets and Crowns”
Israel Eliraz: “Untitled”
Lori Levy: “Check-Up in Beer Sheva,” “Nursing Home Lies”
Nicholas Samaras: “Alatsata, I Bring You My Mother,” “Immigrant by Repetition”
Jameel al-Jameel: “Paleness of Time”
Nineb Lamassu: “28/04/6767”
Bijan Najdi: “Happiness”
Adele Ne Jame: “The SS France and the Ruthless Furnace of This World”
Mariam Gomaa: “Qahwa”
Jessica Abughattas: “She Cannot Bear to Hear His Name”
Nada Faris: “All Knowledge is Permissible,” “Parachutes”
Darius Atefat-Peckham: “An Explosion of Feathers”
Mohja Kahf: “Spaciousness (al-Inshirah)”
Salim Barakat: “Fog Composed Like a Gentleman”
Alaz Ada: “The Tulip Age,” “The Hunger Thief”
Joshua Sassoon Orol: “Daughter of Egypt,” “Diaspora Prayer”
Hedy Habra: “Though It Still Appears to Be a Dream”
Maya Wahrman: “My Grandfather Said I Spoke Spanish Like Cervantes”
Ibtisam Barakat: “Rhythm”
Fiction: General Submissions/Francine Ringold Awards
Desiree Evans: “Whirligig”
Skye Anicca: “Places I’ve Never Been”
Doug Ramspeck: “Summer”
Poetry: General Submissions/Francine Ringold Awards
Cynthia Amoah: “for my grandmother, when words fail”
Roy Mash: “At the Wedding the DJ Puts on an Oldie”
Susan Friberg: “Safe Passage,” “Sleeping Birds,” “Ghosts”
Danielle Gosselin: “protector pulse”
Sarah Elrich: “All Maps Are Moving”
Caleb Nolen: “Yellow Jacket,” “Night Drives on the PA-26”
James Crews: “Telling My Mother”
Christopher Costabile: “Old Smoke”
Erin L. McCoy: “Notice of an Ice-Carried Boulder at Borgholm,” “Memoir of the Late John Wolley by Alfred Newton”
Reyna Clancy: “Miss July ‘85”
Lauren Saxon: “Tomorrow,” “Ghost Boys”
Katherine Stingley: “A Daughter Goes to Work”
Neva Herrington: “Dining with Marjorie”
Awards 40
Fall/Winter 2018, Vol. 62. No. 1
Editor’s Note
Fiction
Sharon Solwitz: “Tremblement”
Ellen Rhudy: “Would You Know Me”
Ellen Furman: “Things”
Liz Ziemska: “Hunt Relic”
Amy Shearn: “Some Fun”
Mimi Lok: “Last of Her Name”
Poetry
Michael Warr: “What Not To Do . . . (an unfinished poem after Michael Harriot at The Root)”
Emma DePanise: “Dry Season,” “My Mother Can’t Say the Word,” “Your Fear of Everything Is Not . . .,” “Did Anna Bertha Ludwig Ask to . . .,” “Late, January,” “Sustenance”
Megan Merchant: “Marrow,” “A thousand words is worth a picture,” “Eurydice,” “Pulp,” “Unfurling”
Susan Nguyen: “Beast Angel,” “If I Say My Body is Grieving”
Namrata Verghese: “Kathakali”
Adela Najarro: “Chantico Swings”
Darrel Alejandro Holnes: “The land is made a stepmother,” “20 de Diciembre, 1989: When the . . .” “For My Mother, The Black . . .”
Mark Smith-Soto: “Let It Spill”
Cornelia Veenendaal: “Rehearsal”
Susan Landgraf: “What’s Left”
Mel Elberger: “Recipe”
Caroline Berblinger: “Interviewing My Grandfather,” “For Taylor,” “April Again”
Elizabeth Rees : “Elegy for Good Health,” “Our Newborns Down the Hall . . .,” “No Other Name for Mother,” “Complicit”
Emily Harman : “Cairn”
Josephine Yu: “Women Grieving,” “Dog with Cataracts,” “The Day After We Killed the Dog,” “Persona Non Grata”
Kate Gaskin: “Shark Week During the Apocalypse”
Jeanne Wagner: “Dogs That Look Like Wolves,” “Scald,” “Why I’m Often Suspected of Shoplifting”
Christie Towers: “Sugar Water in Winter”
Chrissy Kolaya: “The House Sitters”
Brian Czyzyk: “Baba Yaga’s Antidote for Aimlessness,” “Presque Isle,”
Don Colburn: “Ginkgo on 19th,” “Poem in December”
Don Hogle: “Mother”
Katherine Gaffney: “With Ghost”
John Walser: “Heaven,” “Vincent Street April”
Rebecca Foust: “Spring Is”
W.J. Herbert: “The Smell of Almost Rain”
S. B. Merrow: “Craving”
Benjamin Garcia: “Gay Epithalamium”
Matty Layne Glasgow : “Plumage,” “Ash Mama,” “bitter-berry”
J. Bailey Hutchinson: “Became My Body, Too”
Melanie Figg: “Psyche’s History of Houses”
Freesia McKee: “Peeling an Orange”
Caroline Earleywine: “Lipstick,” “What if our love wasn’t”
Ayokunle Falomo: “The World’s Loudest Sound”
Ryan Meyer: “Estuary,” “from Forgetting Guidelines”
Matthew MacFarland: “Singing Saw,” “Hic abundant lupi”
Roger Camp: “Ascension”
Kelly Michels: “What I mean when I say he went . . .”
Luke J. Johnson: “Song of the Stillborn”
Arne Weingart : “The Painting of the Barn without the . . .”
Lee Sharkey: “To Look Out Is to See; to Look In, to . . .”
Anna Scotti: “When I could still be seen,” “Five Children and It,” “Feathers of Gold”
Virtual Readings: Words on Play
Joanna Currey
“Easter Even”: https://vimeo.com/403111689
“Somerset Olde Creek Pool & Rec. Center”: https://vimeo.com/405072407
Michelle Penn
“The surfers”: https://vimeo.com/user112183595/review/405390164/c452951e6d
“Self-Portrait in Multiple Universes”: https://vimeo.com/user112183595/review/405389590/7c60c90f20
“A history of paper clips in Paris”: https://vimeo.com/user112183595/review/405389153/cf81188d48
Amelia Williams
“The Catch”: https://vimeo.com/401925497
Marjorie Maddox
“Play Therapy,” “Taboo”: https://vimeo.com/user110812570/review/400988372/68b60feed4
Dorsey Olbrich
“The Pirate Anne Bonny and I Play Video Games”: https://vimeo.com/user110836210/review/401099099/31e7847026.
Max Heinegg
“Blueberrying”: https://vimeo.com/400668403
Gauraa Shekhar
“Other Significant Others: A Glossary” (excerpt):
Amy Miller
“After the Concert,” “What We Laugh At”: https://vimeo.com/401961408?fbclid=IwAR1MtQ7ejR93Jt7lxPfE-SK8lwOW4xA_xB1fONsp0pwd7QRhrdhxSz5ZgqI
Brooke Sahni
“What My Mother Knows,” “The Golden Reserve”: https://vimeo.com/401800518?fbclid=IwAR1bYcelJ5_E9kitGsZSqAmbv1poH_9pklgXebx5JLHZ12dTjb4-3kDuoRs
Patrick Kindig
“what they don’t tell you about dido & aeneas”: https://vimeo.com/401487078?fbclid=IwAR2wN_pz5R3Z0u1W3Ry1K1SKTs-NPECHWnL3Wb2iD_rn5mrO9Ie4vFqWiWI
Liz Ahl
“Home Game”: https://vimeo.com/401146170?fbclid=IwAR0jviMUznBfPQbUYLN2fCpSNeA1Yw6RV-7jzsiGsSFOV__KHfLCkNCoVqM
Markham Johnson
“At the Track, Waiting for Jesus”: https://vimeo.com/user110886525?fbclid=IwAR12bqcNP3fhIqA1cMhRqkRIAjKG78FbVpyysTuxqjBrJ-92HxGDzWVZDq8
Myra Shapiro
“Dearth,” “The letter d”: https://vimeo.com/401090835/2b436a24a3?fbclid=IwAR1hS-COZn7Ijq2Hr7frONzGR27v_xdKK96onzwQi0B9aAW72O0S8D3-Bs8
Ellen Kombiyil
“The Last Joyride”: https://vimeo.com/409837850?fbclid=IwAR25pPVQI3JS0FFwnQD-61GN26-_n50IJt-0LBVbWANPrBUCg3u68LsSt-A
