Abstract: Nowadays, Ms. Starling would get fired. I remember when the test results got announced. It happened to be a Friday, near the end of the Spring semester, my tenth grade year. I would spend the entire weekend, then the month of May, then my next two years, burdened by the outcome. Fuck, I’d think about it throughout college, and later when I took on job after job in non-profit sectors—United Way, Boys and Girls Clubs of the Carolinas, Habitat for Humanity, Make-a-Wish, Alzheimer’s Association. Why did she think it necessary to go through the roll of her American history class and let everyone know' No teacher later thought it necessary to spiel out PSAT or SAT scores. No one ever got on the intercom at 8:30 in the ... Read More PubDate: 2022-09-18T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: “The US Justice Department announced Tuesday it found insufficient evidence to support federal criminal charges against two officers in relation to the fatal 2014 shooting of Tamir Rice in an Ohio ... Read More PubDate: 2022-09-18T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: George Singleton’s writing is wild and yet humane. It is Southern, but also important in a much more broad and worldly way—because the characters feel familiar, and on the simplest level, their plights are our own.My relationship with George started in a fashion somewhat reflective of one of his stories. Around the same time his previous book, Staff Picks, and my book Alligator Zoo-Park Magic came out in 2019, we learned that we have a good friend in common—his former high school girlfriend. We’ve kept up since.His latest book, You Want More, was released in September. I wrote to George shortly before the 2020 election and asked if he would want to sit down and talk for this interview. After discussions regarding ... Read More PubDate: 2022-09-18T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Elisabeth Adwin Edwards’s poems have appeared in Rust + Moth, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, The American Journal of Poetry, A-Minor Magazine, and elsewhere; her creative nonfiction appears in CutBank, On The Seawall, and Her-Stry. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and a Pushcart Prize. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and daughter in an apartment filled with books.Jai Hamid Bashir is an autistic poet and creative from the American West. Born to Pakistani-American artists, Jai is a recent graduate of Columbia University. Her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Guernica Magazine, Black Warrior Review, Asian American Writer’s Workshop, Wildness, The Cortland Review, Palette Poetry, and ... Read More PubDate: 2022-09-18T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: When Katie and I talk, we always circle back to the fact that we’re both blonde and born in June, a day and a year apart. We live up to our Gemini reputations, we decide. We’re cousins. Outsiders. Always the ones shrugging at jokes men make about blonde women, at not-so-subtle “what will you do with your life” glares. The ones standing in corners of rooms at family gatherings. I like to think we understand one another on a level usually reserved for sisters.She’s less talkative today and sits with her back to me, only speaking to her boyfriend, who says about three words and keeps a Mountain Dew bottle nearby to collect his tobacco spit. From what little is articulated, I gather that he leaves her for months at a ... Read More PubDate: 2022-09-18T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: They met on a fall afternoon, a Tuesday, as two voices crossing on the party line. The line was called Gal Pals and like the others you paid a fee to leave your ad and then women could leave you a message. These lines don’t exist anymore, but this was the spring of 1969 and in those days the gals in search of pals on Long Island found each other, for the most part, first by telephone.It was Eva who dialed for Claudia, even though after that it was always Claudia who made things progress between them. Eva’s recorded ad ran as follows: Hello, I’m Eva and I’m a 28-year-old Italian working girl from Mott Street in New York City. We moved out to Queens when I was in high school and I’m still here, but I do work in the ... Read More PubDate: 2022-09-18T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Lorrie searched her closet until she found her decade-old tennis outfit and the still pristine sneakers she’d bought after a New Year’s resolution. She changed and jogged down to the park. The trail was damp and cool, lined by ferns and deep puddles. When she passed under the bridge, traffic rumbled far above her.Starting that afternoon, she ran three miles a day.After the second missed call, her mother asked, “Did you meet someone'”“No. I started to run.”She could imagine the verdict: Typical. Of all possible sports, it’s running. The Hermit’s Delight.By September, Lorrie was running ten miles a day.A leathery woman in a Boston Marathon t-shirt always gave her a look when they passed each other. Her face and ... Read More PubDate: 2022-09-18T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: I once dated a brilliant stage manager who sold Quaaludes in midtown. He lived in Manhattan Plaza, subsidized housing for professional actors and such. I’d drive into Manhattan from Jersey in my battered-up VW bug, park in the Plaza garage feeling like somebody, then sneak up the 25 floors to Alan’s apartment so I could avoid running into Michael in the elevator, who also lived there, the guy I was cheating on. I didn’t have the heart to break up with him.We were in show business at the time, congregating at dawn in the Actors Equity Lounge, awaiting the dreaded auditions. A couple here, a couple there. Several times a day we’d exit stuffy rehearsal rooms with plastic smiles— “How did it go'” “Great, how was ... Read More PubDate: 2022-09-18T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: In the deadliest mass shooting in the city’s history, a man armed with two semiautomatic pistols and a silencer walked into a public utilities building, killing 12 people and wounding four ... Read More PubDate: 2022-09-18T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: I tell Americo that my friend Andrew could have survived on the street. He grew up in Kansas, worked on a farm and knew how to live outdoors. One time, when he and I were on assignment in Afghanistan, Andrew gathered scrap and built a grill and barbecued a slab of meat he bought on a street in Kabul called Butchery where water buffalo and chickens were slaughtered, necks cut, hanging from hooks tongues protruding, lolling to one side like dead fish. Blood on the pavement diluted pink from water dripping out of buckets where dead birds soaked before being plucked, eyes open, flies manic.Andrew lives with his younger brother, Tim, in Alaska now. I’d just spoken to Tim before I met with Americo, a homeless man I’m ... Read More PubDate: 2022-09-18T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Jack the Journalist came to expose LA crime, then killed 3 prostitutes in homage to his subject. Of ___ active American serial killers, see what three-quarters call home and happy hunting— Lots leading out to nowhere, people all chased off; Actual ghost towns under the star of doom; Man in his hole by some party store. In order to move such an audience, you must write coldly:A parking ticket is not atrocity, no matter how unjust. Setting up in the middle of bad industry, film crews first hack through the knots of our improperly buried: Apocalypse with so little prep. In this subculture of specters, the estimate of unknown murders in history is our ‘Dark Figure’: Scores whose magnitude we wandered through in a ... Read More PubDate: 2022-09-18T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: I don’t understand a door that doesn’t lock. My mother, Rita, used to say honest people don’t need locks. She was quoting her mother, the woman dead before I was born, from too many smoked cigarettes—elegant, I’m sure, in their own forlorn sort of way. I never understood the logic of honest people not needing locks—does it mean people who are honest don’t have to worry about hiding things, or that if we as a people, all people, were honest, we would collectively have no reason to lock anything' I thought of the people so foolishly honest that they had no locks at all, their belongings stolen, their honesty ravaged repeatedly.When I was three or four, I somehow locked the bathroom door, trapping myself inside. This ... Read More PubDate: 2022-09-18T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Bonnie was peeing near the creek bank when Gail heard the metallic rattle of the Tin Can Man. Gail dragged her by the leash down the icy bank and watched anxiously for him to pass.The rattling sound of tin cans grew louder, and about half a block away, he came out of the dark carrying his pack on his back, his shoulders stooped, and crossed the lighted street. He disappeared again into the shadows of the trees.Bonnie heaved her entire Corgi weight toward the creek, knocking Gail off balance and making her slide a bit on the icy ground, uncomfortably near the freezing water. “Stop it,” Gail whispered. “I’m pretty sure you can’t swim.” They climbed the bank and came out on the street. It was good no one was around ... Read More PubDate: 2022-09-18T00:00:00-05:00
Open Access journal
[6 journals]
