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 laughter. On the left, two small boys run past. Behind you, mist rises from the river. On the right, men start arguing loudly. Within a few seconds, you are dropped into the middle of the story, exactly where the screenwriter wants you to be. Watching a movie this way reminds me of how I feel … Continue reading Inhabiting Your Character by Deborah Prum→
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 had ever perceived, was wiped clean. For those few moments, the world flashed white, then just as quickly, his whole reality dumped back down on him, a furious writhing mess he could not make sense of. Then he blacked out. When he regained consciousness, he was lying in a pool of his own blood-tinged vomit. He had two thoughts; one … Continue reading Broken by Alison Thompson→
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 dot of a bird moving slowly, often left to right, and you admit, although you know it’s something that shouldn’t be said, considering God granted us dominion, that, despite being small, such a bird possibly matters more to the world than yourself? Todd Copeland’s poems have appeared in The Journal, High Plains Literary Review, Southern Poetry Review, The … Continue reading Nightfall and Infra Dig, 2 poems by Todd Copeland→
Podcast: Mishaps are not always random. A short story performed by Jennifer Sims. Read the story online: Accidents Will Happen by Nancy Christie Follow us!
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 yet. Every June, after school was out for the summer, we would pack the car and drive to our cottage by a lake in Rutland, Massachusetts, where we stayed until Labor Day. The drive seemed long when I was little, but it could not have been more than forty minutes. My father’s parents had given this cottage … Continue reading A Cottage by the Lake by Miles Fowler→
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 night, Devoid of sense and motion? John Milton, Paradise Lost In the middle of the night, my husband sat up; he’d been coughing too much and I’d been lying awake listening to his rasping breathing. His doctors understand as much as anyone about his little-known lung disease, but that’s not saying much. They’d ordered an oxygen tank which … Continue reading Memento Mori by Melissa Knox→
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 him here at all this time of year. Pacing the oak planks of the writing room upstairs, sitting at the table, wearing these glasses, staring through the window out at Greylock, Greylock whose back reminded him of whales. It’s easier in winter. In winter when the five hemlocks in the yard are a five-masted bark. When the mountain … Continue reading Arrowhead, Melville’s Home, Pittsfield, Massachusetts by J.R. Solonche→
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 remarried and we moved to a farm on the edge of Appalachian Ohio with no running water, an outhouse, coal stove, and three acres of gardens for me to plow and hoe by hand. I believe the long days working outside allowed me to merge with and absorb the quiet rhythms of nature, so that the … Continue reading Digital Art by Edward Michael Supranowicz→
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, interwoven like the white, fraying threads of our patched-up quilt we bought on the side of a highway in New Mexico where a girl was swishing a hula hoop on the points of her hips as she danced like an accident in progress. My hand settles on the wall, sliding down peeling paper and strip away a large … Continue reading Hooping by Bailey Merlin→
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, a retired carpenter who’s lived on my street for thirty-five years. (My mom paid him to build me a loft bed when I was 16.) Paul. How can she not know who Paul is? He spends every day outside, walking a few hundred yards, resting, walking, and smoking, always in pressed white carpenter pants. I … Continue reading Photo of My Street by Katie Davis→
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