Imagine being told at your annual physical that you have a cancerous spot on your right lung. Then, in a follow-up that you have a year left to live. One year. That’s all. Imagine having to squeeze all your dreams and plans for the future onto the pages of a single wall calendar. That is what happened to Dawn West, who is still alive today, twenty-six years after that terminal diagnosis. Dawn and I had been dating for a month when she received the devastating news. After her first diagnosis, we visited other doctors for … Continue reading Beating a Death Sentence by Bill Glose→
Irish-American New Yorkers—especially those of the Catholic persuasion—have a knack for fatalist worst-case scenarios. Maybe it’s the indigenous oppression and starvation imprinted long ago on our DNA. Maybe it’s the second-class steerage tickets to America that marked us not just for life, but for generations. Maybe it’s from perpetually feeling two lengths behind, no matter how fast we sprint. It’s most assuredly from ill-fitting plaid Catholic school uniforms and the dysfunctional religious practice of making pride—and the inherent, innocent swell of joy—sinful. For some reason, I couldn’t sleep tonight. I woke at 2 am, … Continue reading The Odd and Tender Clarity of 4 AM Kathleen McKitty Harris→
I was strolling with my wife in Brookline, Massachusetts, on a charming street with clothing and gift stores, Japanese restaurants, delis, and a Japanese tea house. I ducked into a bookstore, assuring my wife that I would be out in a minute, not pivoting quickly enough to miss her exasperated eye roll. After browsing the fiction and poetry sections, examining the New Releases and Bargain tables and the Staff Picks rack, and then doing an analysis of which book covers made a book stand out (getting ideas for the cover design for my then upcoming … Continue reading Booking It by E. H. Jacobs→
Among the activities of our local Parks and Recreation Department are youth sports (including cheerleading), a genealogy class, bingo, adult softball, “track chair” outings, gymnastics, Taekwondo, a class on identifying and removing invasive plants, and yoga. The yoga offered may not strictly conform to any of the seven modern varieties or schools (other than the fact that classes are held in a repurposed school building!), but is exactly what most participants need and want. Frankly, there are as many species of yoga as there are individuals: every one’s grimace is DNA different. The class … Continue reading Yoga Today by Fred Wilbur→
Somewhere locked in geostationary orbit over Virginia, a satellite maintains its dumb stare. Prompt it with a series of numbers and you can provoke it to produce pictures of Jefferson’s Monticello or that place you and your friends used to sneak off to by the Rapidan. 38.24521°N, 78.11247°W gets you to a concrete alley back of a post office loading dock. The satellite looks down, but once your thirteen-year-old eyes were looking up from that alley. Feet freezing in your too-tight shoes, slipping through the gray slush of a melting snow pile. Freedom on a … Continue reading The Alley by Alex Joyner→
As I read this year’s contest entries, I accumulated a deep appreciation for the humans who invested the thought and energy to create them and who took the time to submit them to our contest. Thank you, fellow poets. We received 137 entries and co-editor Sharon and I have read then all. Our task was tough as there were many seriously contending poems. I found that I was in conversation with each poem. My wife thought I was mumbling to myself as perhaps a first sign of losing me. In a sense, my interaction with … Continue reading 2026 Poetry Contest Announcement by Fred Wilbur→
Ceramic artist Judd Jarvis finds a thoughtful middle ground between form and function. It’s tempting to suggest that Virginia’s famous red clay soil lured potter Judd Jarvis from the Midwest’s dark earth to Charlottesville. Jarvis’s ceramic artistry is far removed, though, from the utilitarian brick that surrounds us, and even a far cry from the negative-space narratives of ancient Greek red-figure pottery. His work is proof that ceramics, despite the simple functionality that so many people expect of it, is art for art’s sake in the right hands. “I used to be more hung up … Continue reading Pots for Art’s Sake: A Look at Judd Jarvis’s Work by Russell Hart→
It wasn’t when I got the hang of cursing, exquisitely and generously, tutored by the bigger kids at the back of the school bus. It wasn’t when I puffed on my buddy’s mom’s unfiltered Kools in the woods—throat raw, lungs afire, coughing triumphantly. It wasn’t when I thumbed through Dad’s Playboy magazines and delighted at the sight of nipples peeking through an open plaid flannel shirt. It wasn’t when I thought I was the last one on the playground to know how babies are made. (After a night in a tent in the backyard with … Continue reading Splitting Wood by David Sapp→
One day after school, I stepped into my room and immediately felt that something was wrong. My eyes darted to the bed, and my heart stopped. The mattress was gone. My diary—the one I’d hidden so carefully beneath it—was missing too. I rushed to the balcony, where laundry usually fluttered on a frayed line. There it was: my palm tree mattress, spread out in the sun like a giant pancake. But my diary was nowhere to be found. Someone had discovered it. And deep down, I knew exactly who. Then my father appeared from another … Continue reading When My Secrets Were No Longer Mine by Jean Romano→
Sukey Gap Graveyard The road here is pocked with holes, graves strung mostly in mistflower or phlox, apt to spread airy trails. Not a place for plastic lilies who squall into the quiet, but moss with enough give to muffle the whole of your existence, let a mythology larger than your own encompass the knee, the folded hands, words dampening what’s left of sunken or toppled names. One stone says Perninia, my third great grandmother, who holds open the iron gate then closes it behind me, and flies softly into the trees. She sings from … Continue reading Mind the Gap by Sharon Perkins Ackerman→
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