This is not a story about my grandfather by Salena Casha On July 26, 1956, my grandfather’s suitcase hit a seabed at the bottom of the Atlantic just off the coast of Nantucket. While made of newly flogged leather cinched…
Amber Rose
Amber Rose by J.B. Stone After Anne Sexton’s “Briar Rose” When you crawled out of your pod, slinked unto the branches: a newborn insectoid, exploring the earth eons ago, you were told you would rise into a throne of horns,…
The Consort of Closed Fists
Read and listen in English. Read and listen in Chinese / 中文. The Consort of Closed Fists by Lixin Foo When the Emperor banished her in chains, her fingers moved on instinct. As a child, she’d made a habit of…
In the Hours Before the 1959 Auchengeich Coal Mine Disaster
In the Hours Before the 1959 Auchengeich Coal Mine Disaster by Marie Hoy-Kenny You wake, your wife Jean still serene in sleep, breathing deeply beside you. The sky is dark through the cracks between the curtains, but last night you…
Cords
Cords by Isabelle B.L I’m a whale, a bell and a multifunctional cord. Today, I receive something to make my waist smaller. The giver says: “It’s made with 98 whale bones, my dear.” Hands of a woman I can’t see…
Hunger
Hunger 1315 by Claire Loader The storms came in the spring, slipped the waking earth, hushed her back to sleep again. We scraped the bottom of our winter bowls, stagnated hours lingering, listless – lips parched with thinning prayers. I…
Footprints in Water
Footprints in Water by Robert Barrett On Christmas Eve, she fell; sucked downwards through the angry, screaming wind, head first, through two miles of unencumbered sky, and no thought can take root, only the biting of the seatbelt across her…
I Have Suffered the Atrocity of Sunsets
I Have Suffered the Atrocity of Sunsets by Morgan Quinn Today you wake up late, but Mama doesn’t scold. She plaits the inky waterfall of your hair as you eat your breakfast, then presses an onigiri into your hand and…
Granddaddy at War
Granddaddy at War by Barbara Diggs My grandfather stands straight as the rifle he won’t be allowed to touch. Trenches may be choked with corpses across the ocean, but a weapon in the hands of a black man is no…
The Defenestration of Jezebel
The Defenestration of Jezebel by Jack Somers The queen wore her finest on the morning of her death. The lotus silk gown, pale as the blanched beaches of Sidon. The damask linen stole, soft as moth wings, green as the…