Udara Juice by Ada Nnadi
i. Many things about the new wife I had married worried me. Presently, I feared that marriage had turned her timid. She sat at the edge of the bed with her hands folded in her lap. Her glasses were…
Tag: Metaphor
Holding by Laura Joyce-Hubbard
I orbit in the wide sky over the Gulf of California. Every takeoff is the same, but I am always on alert for the one that will be different. In Bosnia or Boston. Panama or Palm Springs. On short…
Solid Liquid Glass by Linh Preston
Two thousand, four hundred, twenty-nine texts. Over the course of 625 days, I exchange 2,429 texts with my boss, Will. For the first 149 days, 88 percent of our texts are work-related. Like the twenty texts between us about…
Feather Brained by Jennifer Maloney
I’m just sitting down to write when my mother descends out of a Winston-blue cloud, nosy-necked, squinting. Her head glints with bobby pins, skinned-tight and sectioned, mapped out like a city block, an argument for redlining, a gerrymander, aspirational,…
Lessons in Entomology by Gabriel Holton
Pilgrims We stumble through the door of our new Florida home at two in the morning, doubled over from exhaustion. My father and grandpa follow closely behind, parking the U-Haul down the street. That makes seven of us in…
Terminal Portraiture by Davin Faris
i. Candies gush across the ground. They clot and pool. Where the pale floorboards converge against the wall, they glitter in a long stream of plastic-wrapped sweets, the sort you’d see on a receptionist’s desk. Red, yellow, green, swirled…
Cliff Notes for Seasons by Julie Marie Wade
We haven’t seen her in weeks, our neighbor with white hair that tufts and spumes, not a trace of color in it, not even a sliver of gray. We never learned her name, but we noticed—the way you notice…
Scattered and Borne Aloft: On Dandelions, Dumplings, and the Idea of Weeds by Judy Chu
The concept of what is or what is not a weed is not precisely defined because it has both biological and sociological elements. Biologically, weeds are plants having the ability to colonize, inhabit and thrive in continually disturbed habitats,…
My Mother the Nectarine by Megan Haeuser
My mother never ripened. When she was young, they bit into her and stopped the natural ripening process. After they’d spit her out, she stayed green until she began to rot. At the end of her life she was…
Wicked Americana by Sacha Bissonnette
I told my mom I loved her at a gas station in Minnesota but I’m not sure she heard. The cashier must’ve been stocking drinks or something so it felt like it was just me and her in there.…
