NONFICTION

The Deer | Western Humanities Review

My mother moves through my first memories under bitter oak, barefoot in spite of the strange, sharp thaw, walking the deer path to the creekhead. Her hair is loose and wild. Sweat pools at the bottom of her back, staining her shirt. Shh, she says.

 

I Have Carried Them As They Have Carried Me | Cherry Tree: A National Literary Journal @ Washington College

Two come at the car from the field. Come fleet at the flat night. Arrive in a lash of imminent light: flash foot banded white throat high orbital eye tempo of twin tandem drums. Pronghorn, cutting across the asphalt.

 

I Press the Place That Bruises | Black Warrior Review

Someday I will see the starved bear in the burn scar. Will limp up from the road. Will go alone into the lull. Forget to clap and break no sticks. Slip in slit light in soot. Stack isolate stones.

 

I Am Not A Modern Woman | Fugue

I want the cry of the calf at night. I want the woman-wail of the mountain lion feeding from the field. I want what I can catch by camera flash, if lucky: black-tipped tail; retractile claw in calf’s belly; mouth of broken bones.

 

A New Way to Break a Body | Fairy Tale Review | the Translucent Issue

Bare branches hang in strange angles beyond the window—they stob the screen and glass, are stark, bent, black. They stack sharp, black shadows in my lap. There has been snow; there is snow still: black and brown birds lie like black and brown cankers in it.

So the afternoon slips past.

What form is there, when the fundamental form has failed?

Cold berries in a cluster. A fungal spore in wet wood, beginning to open.

 

Stones | Penny

Lonely tantrums. Eyelids. Adhesive bandages. Mother says that you have taken a course. Mother says that you can intubate a man and shake his stomach back into its sac. You sent her a copy of your stamped certificate.

But your eyelid. I rapped it with a little stone. It broke and you bled.

 

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FICTION

I Play Per the Small Child’s Instruction | jmww

The small child provides our illuminating game with two tools—a flashing fishing wire, a black boat—and we slip our skins to trawl primordial waterways where blind salamanders slap. The small child is rocked with joy. Soon we will see a shallow ocean, he says, swatting his haunches.

 

A Geologic History of Northern Arizona, with Dogs | Waxwing

Hence the sudden slip and quake, shaking my brother out of bed.

Hence the long mineral seam where the canyons creak.

Hence the bent, weird walls where we used to walk in the old cities.

 

Two Stories Soldiers Still Tell | The Collapsar

Here is a story that the soldiers still tell:

It is about Alexander in the sunlit city of Corinth.

 

Three Stories Soldiers Still Tell | Gigantic Sequins

Here is a story that the soldiers still tell:

It is about Alexander in the red rods of the setting sun.

 

Incisor/Canine | The Best American Experimental Writing Anthology​ (BAX)​

Boy wore red shoes. The soles were leather; the laces were like silk. Soft, soft. No socks. Only little feet. Ten thorny toes. Two plantar warts. Metatarsal bones.

Tarsus to carpus: Boy opened the door. He regarded the room.

 

Oil Dog | The Collagist

In the desert, the physicist lets the air out of his tires. They deflate and flatten into the sand, air spitting past the depressed pin and pressure gauge. His subordinates gather around him like debts and express their skepticism. The other training teams aren’t doing this, his subordinates say. Are you sure this will work?

The physicist nods.

 

“O” and “Sweet Mouth” from Ash | A-Minor Magazine

The horned pater god stitches himself into the night sky. The future is there, in a fissure of the cosmos; it is an ancient lust-puzzle and the pater god’s grief is a quake maker: brittle stars shiver and their axes open. The pater god moans. She will never love me.

 

Heat #2 (interruption) | Springgun

—hands as hard as peach pits and in them objects arranged—ornament over structure—to denote tendernesses. Ribbons piled on pins: that is for remembrance; and scissors: that is for thoughts. And three flat hairs, sooty and long, plucked from brush bristles.

Aza like a cat on the floor twists her hips and simpers and crows.

 

Consummation | Caketrain, Issue 08

Just as he furrows his fields, your father furrows his forehead. He speaks of cotton, corn, citrus—his things—and opening up his dirty palms, he grasps the ashy air. His squat skeleton settles within his shriveling body and beneath his flannel shirt and sacred layers, he sweats. The fire has jumped the mountains; the valley is burning.

 

Fiber | Abjective

I wonder whether she foresaw me as I have witnessed her, the progenitor of our curse, wearing white and weaving with arthritic hands and bone needles and one, red thread. Her eyes wide and her purple veins webbing under open pores and into the clutched crevices of her nostrils, I have seen her smiling over us, laughing, weaving, clucking. This is the image that I have of her.

 

His Placid Piano Notes | The Albion Review

He had come upon her in the early morning hours, his eyelids pried wide at the glass pipe that emerged from between the open prongs of her jawbone. Her throat, splashed red like a hummingbird’s, caught his stare and held it, drew it away from the twisted body and the coarse brown dress that she wore like unpresuming plumage.