1. Following August across New Mexico borders into rain so fast grinding glass and asphalt, I lose the white markings where the lanes go, numbers on road signs, arrows. I can’t see the other cars or hear them. I’m negotiating windshield wipers, still learning to shift; weaving stupidly through Gallup, missing interchanges, overpasses, merging or […]
Contributors 64
Julia Story: Winter in Iowa
I cheer myself up by creating a system for getting things done. I pull the pipe from your hand and fling it through the window. I explain to you the difference between helping and taking while you are unfolding yourself in my hand, an unfolding that takes place nightly. Every night we talk about things […]
Julia Story: Planting the Baby
Several children are walking in their swimming suits toward the red barn. A naked fat man sits on the roof. The sun is in patches and without sufficient legs. Nothing is rooted down, not these tall flowers, not this piece of paper in the wind. These children appear to touch the earth, but it is […]
Julia Story: Barking
I planted lettuce while the farmer plowed something. There was a loud whirring. I put each leaf in the ground and dumped old rainwater over them. I became filthy. The dog found me and sniffed thoroughly. I let him. Then the whirring stopped and the farmer went into the woods with a small wooden pipe. […]
Kristy Nielsen: 9:30 p.m.
“No, I don’t feel that he’s with me,” I say although I’m winning at cards and a warm breeze blows the hair from my face. Though the cat who likes no one sleeps in my lap and mosquitoes reject my blood tonight. I play the winking Jack of Spades and take the trick. The chair […]
Kristy Nielsen: Waiting to Be Rescued
In the suburbs a man kills another snake, chopping it with a hoe in front of the neighbors. I bend over in the field nearby in the long grass, open, crawling toward something to finger my senses awake. In the suburbs sun shines. Snakes return, men take up shovels and gleaming hoes. If my father […]