Collage has always been at the center of my creative work. I began by accident or twist of fate, with a pile of magazines and a pair of little pink scissors. A fun project to do something crafty turned […]

SPRING CHILL

With the spring day
coursing cool

in the shade,
I turn a street corner

and, struck by sun,
feel

a recollection
start to formulate, not

as an image, or even
as an […]

Sometimes, modern life feels dried out and far away from what nourishes. In our chase to connect, we climb ladders that promise better tomorrows and disconnect from what feels good under our feet. We forget the […]

Doris said, “Seems like it might snow. First of the season.”

She turned from where she stood in front of the kitchen window and looked at Martin. He was sitting at the table holding a nearly full glass of mil […]



Podcast: Down and out and on the brink of even worse.

A short story performed by Joe Guay.

Read the story online: Turkeys by R.H. Emmers

Last month, as we celebrated our daughter’s 17th birthday, it struck me that we would enjoy only one more birthday celebration together as a family unit before she heads off to college. Her birthday falls in O […]

I call him Fenimore
To remember his species.

Each morning
I walk to the mailbox
And look to see him,
Cased against the cold
In his feather cocoon of wings and trapped air.
He seems less a hawk than
An […]

I probably started working towards becoming an artist in middle school in Charlottesville. I made little comics to sell to my friends and I’d fill up my homework and test sheets with doodles in the […]

When I was five years old my stepdad, Bill, found Precious as a stray kitten in the parking lot of his office and brought him/her home. We had him/her fixed at the appropriate time, but later, no one could […]

Feeding

The redpolls arrived like Christmas cards
scattered beneath our backyard feeder,
little red seals atop their heads
like wax on parchment.
What might be the medieval message
they brought to the […]

Poetry and publishing: two topics that seem diametrically opposed, if you look at them under the perspective that’s the norm in the USA—that of business, capitalism, popular culture. Shake off that norm, how […]

The familiar constriction arose in her chest. She followed the dark echoes of her husband’s steps; his gait sober as cold coffee. Heel, toe. March. She giggled at the image of her husband as a soldier. Hi […]

I was typing my alternate ID number into the keypad at my (formerly) favorite grocery store when the perky cashier asked if I qualified for Senior Discount Thursday. My finger froze midair.

“Excuse m […]

I have removed my shirt and am kneeling in a pit
looking up at a man pointing a rifle down at me.
Quiet, everything is eerily quiet now, the morning’s
hissed commands and scrape of shovels long gone.
Why w […]

Clichés abound this time of year. It’s the one season in which it’s OK to speak of holiday magic or lapse into sappy memories like those that surfaced recently when I ran across a 1956 photo of 4-year-old me on t […]

In his 1971 memoir, Me and the Orgone, Orson Bean recounted his life-changing experience undergoing orgone therapy, a body-mind psychotherapy developed eighty years ago by Austrian-born psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich. […]

After I die,
prop the bones
of a beautiful bird
in my mouth.

Call a medicine woman
back from my home star.
Offer tobacco, cedar, sage, sweet grass,
the seven silent petitions of passage.

For all these […]

My name is Mario Loprete. I live in Catanzaro, a small Calabrian city in the south of Italy. We are in the land that the ancient Greeks called “Magna Grecia,” rich in culture and history.

I also travel a l […]



Podcast: When a woman faces the loss of a beloved, aging pet, she finds herself confronting her own experience with age and death.

A short story performed by Jennifer Sims.

Read the story online: E […]