Lobster mitts might cushion the ache,
my hands numbed
by these cold, rain-wet stalks. The stakes
tenacious, anchored
in beds slimed here and there with rot.
Cut twine and a vine collapses,
limp as kelp. Tug […]

“I seem to have become an outrage addict,” I say to a young man at the gym. I’ve just glanced at the TV screens mounted on the wall in front of the aerobic equipment. As usual, CNN is in full eek mode, and so—li […]

When he put this ring on my finger, my skin was smoother, and more supple. My hand was thinner, and less freckled than it is now. When he asked me to marry him, he got down on one knee in front of the London […]

I spent four days and nights smashed against a bus window in transit to my first husband’s family reunion half nauseous from breathing in the diesel fumes and the aroma of the chemical toilet a few feet behind u […]

The Moth
It would be too simple
to describe its motives
as a flame off course,
a light mistaken for sun.
Loveliness is complicated,
a white body against darkness,
the night’s counterfeit
just beyond a s […]

“We’re walking to the midnight service?” my daughter asked. “With all the hooligans out there.”

It was Christmas Eve. I looked out the window onto the streets of our Eastern Shore town. A mostly full moon moved […]

“Haze opened the extra door, expecting it to be a closet. It opened out
onto a drop of about thirty feet and looked down into a narrow bare
back yard where the garbage was collected. There was a plank n […]

A once resplendent roan
lying on its side, legs flailing,
as if it thought—
as if, in its final moment
it could think at all—
that it was still running,
wild and free.

So disdainful, so hig […]

Have you ever used virtual reality goggles to watch a movie? Imagine that the film starts off in an African village. Ahead of you, you see a hut and can almost smell the smoke rising from a campfire. You hear […]

On the third visit, they kicked his stomach and broke his thumbs. The bones cracked like an electrical charge shooting through his entire body, exiting via his skull, as if everything he knew, everything he […]

Nightfall
There are stories
no one knows.
High summer.

The sound of tree frogs
coming
from all quarters.

 
Infra Dig
You know how when the sky
goes to hell in the west
there’s inevitably a black do […]



Podcast: Mishaps are not always random.

A short story performed by Jennifer Sims.

Read the story online: Accidents Will Happen by Nancy Christie

Most of the year while I was growing up, my family lived in a seven-room house in Worcester, Massachusetts. It had three bedrooms, one and a half bathrooms, and a two-car garage, although we didn’t have two cars y […]

To be no more; sad cure; for who would lose,
Though full of pain, this intellectual being,
Those thoughts that wander through Eternity,
To perish rather, swallowed up and lost
In the wide womb of uncreated […]

It’s hard to see him as a farmer, isn’t it?
Bending over the rows of lettuce and corn,
feeling the ears between his thumb and forefinger,

all the while remembering breadfruit and mango?
It’s hard to see h […]

Both the Irish and Ukrainian/Russian sides of my family settled in Allegheny County, and the men worked in the steel mills and coal mines. My mother got on a bus one day and moved to central Ohio. She […]

When we lie side-by-side in an afterglow, he says,
I used to be a man of my word. Neither of us wants
to label his intentions, fearful of finding the meaning
in definition. Our fingers come together, […]

A few years back, a new neighbor called. “Katie, there’s an old man leaning against my front wall, should I call the police?”

I pulled my window up and leaned out to look, just two houses over. There was Paul, […]

The sun was warm and bright as we pedaled our way along the new Ring Road encircling the city. On its outskirts we saw many families working there in the Kathmandu valley, women weaving mats, others rhythmically […]