Emily Kingery teaches English at a small university in Iowa. Her work appears widely in journals, including Birdcoat Quarterly, CutBank, Eastern Iowa Review, GASHER, Gingerbread House, Midwest Review, New South, Plainsongs, Quarter After Eight, and Trampoline, among others, and she has been both a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, as well as […]
Emily Kingery
Emily Kingery: Funeral for a Cat
When the cat was killed by a driver in a tragic hit-and-run, the dirt bike kid watched it happen. He screamed to gather us to her carcass: Pumpkin! He pedaled hard around the block. Pumpkin is dead! I was afraid to tell Dad, at first. He went outside, shoveled Pumpkin into a grocery bag […]
Emily Kingery: Dirtbag Wilderness
Our dirtbags, our dirtbags were medicine men. They spoke as oracles, capped bottles, skated razorblades across the glass of pictures. It’s just like shoveling snow, laughed our dirtbags as they unburied their parents’ faces. Like raking leaves, want to try? We watched their hands swap bills, our eyes […]
Emily Kingery: Wolf at the Door
Her neighbor is hungry, shaking drawers for a blade. His gums are tender worms in wet spring. She hooks her fingers into ornaments to hang on his jaws. Her grandmother’s wisdom was to feed umbilical things, to nourish as roots ripped to lace in her hands. He comes where the […]