CREATIVE NONFICTION
Intrinsic Spin: A Story of Vertigo by Anna Leahy
Here’s a secret about movement: speed cares only about distance, but velocity is aware of direction. Here’s another secret about movement: every living creature on this planet is moving fast. But the body tricks us into not noticing the…
Home Like This by Amanda Whitehurst
Content Warning—self-harm and/or suicide attempt When I visit from the states my cousin Marco becomes wind. In the car to the restaurant where our mothers wait he’s all curls dancing, all cheeks stretching, speeding so fast I’m sure…
Omnipresence by Justine Teu
1. The first ghost I ever learn about is God, circa 1998, in a kindergarten classroom in Queens, New York. My parents have sent me to Catholic school not out of religious devotion, or some need for strictness, but…
How to Write About the Body by Ceridwen Hall
The trick is to write about the body without deploying the body, which has been strained by overuse and anyway tends to make objects or corpses of us: the animals in question. And, we are such animals; my sister…
Even Though He Fell by Maxwell Suzuki
My father, after slipping backward on a stretch of rooted Alaskan ice and hitting his head, miraculously walks the three miles to get back home—heavily concussed and alone—with our two unleashed labs directing him in the winter dark. He…
Sometimes I Feel Lonely in the Diaspora Because I Don’t Have a Mango Poem, So I Wrote a Mango Story by Minyoung Lee
This is a story about oranges. The fruit the rich kids ate when the rest of us ate mandarins. Those kids were nicknamed Orenji-jok and rode fancy cars in Apgujeong. We waited for the winter to buy boxes of…
Paper Flowers by Sonia Alejandra Rodríguez
1. I’m on the 7 train on my way to Manhattan from Queens. My AirPods blast Cardi B’s “I Like It” as I squeeze my way through the crowded car, not liking the pushing and the pulling as I…
Our Therapists Will Tell Us to Call It an Inpatient Facility by Max Hunt
Sunday. None of the puzzles here have all their pieces. The coloring sheets say HAPPY EASTER or HE IS RISEN—it’s January—in that swoopy bubble font usually exclusive to Sunday school worksheets. The staff never remembers to set out new…
The Writer by Matthew Raymond
I never met Paul Bowles, but he was still alive when I passed through Morocco in the summer of 1998. He died the following year, and it is one of my great regrets, these twenty years later, that I…
Weeds by Chelsea Biondolillo
January 2021 Today is a day when I hate my house, I hate it for all the things it will never be. For ceilings that are too high for lights in one room and too low for lights in…