Paper Roses – Jim Plath
Wednesday, May 1, 2013 11:51 — 2 Comments
In late spring, when I was ten years old, my father received orders to return to sea. In the fall of the previous year, my mother had taken a job as a cook in a nursing home to supplement the Navy’s meager pay and when Memorial Day came, she could find nobody to stay with me on my day-off from school. I, like most children at that age, lived in an idyllic naiveté, wherein I believed that no more than some secret combination of promises and pleas stood between my parents and capitulation. True to that form, I made my […]
City Lighthouse 4 – John Osebold
Tuesday, April 23, 2013 13:18 — 0 Comments
NOT LYDIA is not named Lydia. She sits on a park bench one day and sees a mountain hovering over a parking lot. Such a thing! Her brain alights trying to figure it out but instead a piano is on fire underground. She can’t stop crying it’s so beautiful. A single lightbulb flickers on and a voiceover describes things you’re not seeing. A dead man sits with his back turned to us. We realize we’re outside. It’s night and we can’t speak. We just watch the dead man and wonder what his face is. NOT LYDIA spends an entire montage […]
Confabulation, Day 4 – John Englehardt
Monday, April 22, 2013 14:56 — 0 Comments
I remember Emily coming back from the family service center at Fort Benning with a purse full of brochures. One was called “The Challenges of Deployment,†written by Dr. Bruce Bell, who warned me in the first sentence that saying goodbye to my wife wasn’t going to be as romantic as I imagined. “The list of opportunities for crushed hopes is a long one,†he wrote. I remember feeling upset that the army would assume romance is the troll of my imagination, not fear.
Asthma – Ahsan Butt
Wednesday, April 17, 2013 12:33 — 2 Comments
Turbulence used to terrify me. Before I developed the ability, turbulence felt like God’s judgment finally deciding on us. I hated planes. I used to pray so desperately.
Black Bags – Peter Brav
Thursday, April 11, 2013 12:00 — 0 Comments
The last time Hank remembered this much religious fervor in the neighborhood was the day Robin Green came home from Camp Pakatawa in the Catskills, declaring that she had talked to God at the bottom of the lake that separated boy hands from girl underwear. They were all 15 back then and God was delivering daily excuses for doubt in black bags with return addresses in Southeast Asia. There seemed no reason though to doubt Robin, one of the best students Red Oak Middle School had ever seen. She excelled at Math and Social Studies and had even made a […]
Our First Audiobook ft. Zac Hill
Monday, April 1, 2013 10:03 — 0 Comments
I’ve been known to relish the sound of my own voice, so it was only a matter of time before I convinced someone to let me record an audiobook.  After a suitable amount of nagging, the fine folks at The Monarch Review arranged for Seattle music mainstay Robb Benson to lend me his studio for a couple months.  What you see here is the result: a collection of four fictional narrative essays in the style of popular celebrity interest pieces.  They’re 100% made up, of course.  Why this particular subject matter?  It could be because real life is far more fantastic than […]
The Ruins – Piper Daniels
Tuesday, March 5, 2013 12:48 — 0 Comments
There were things neighbors wouldn’t notice about the two-story cedar on Pierce Street. Things beyond the bright teal door, garlanded by evergreens and, in the spring, deep purple impatiens (also known as touch-me-nots) peeking shyly from beds of mulch. Â
Desert Places – Fonda Fan
Thursday, February 21, 2013 13:01 — 0 Comments
“Spare change, spare change†came the litany.
The Crow Of Suspicion – Caleb Powell
Tuesday, January 22, 2013 12:03 — 0 Comments
Jorge counted two months left to serve when he met Mariano, a new arrival to the Casa de Detenção de Paraná, a penitentiary in southern Brazil.  Mariano faced two to four years. Jorge and Mariano had grown up in neighboring favelas outside the city of Londrina. They came from equal dirt: unknown fathers who left pregnant lovers to disappear back to Londrina and their spouses; mothers that died in sadness, leaving quasi-orphans to be raised by elder cousins and aunts. For them, the inchoate sense that “crime paid when nothing else did†hardened into certainty with age.
Pistols Rifles Shotguns and Shovels – Andrew Dwyer
Monday, December 24, 2012 14:12 — 2 Comments
Toes
The answer isn't poetry, but rather language
- Richard Kenney
