what you love about new york
Current Issue / Issue 71 / Sept 2022 / Nonfiction

what you love about new york

by Daisy Hernandez
city, which you never appreciated when you lived here, is how the city requires you to develop muscle memory: your elbows know to circle around the lady who is taking too long to reach the corner, and your big toes stop a second before the jogger dashes in front of...
Cliff Notes for Coming Out
Current Issue / Issue 71 / Sept 2022 / Nonfiction

Cliff Notes for Coming Out

by Julie Marie Wade
Consider that inclemency is always possible. If you come out often enough, and stay out long enough, inclemency may be inevitable. I don’t want to lie to you about this. Once, when I still lived on the West Coast, there was a frightful storm. In the aftermath, I went running...
Creation Myths
Current Issue / Issue 71 / Sept 2022 / Nonfiction

Creation Myths

by Harrison Candelaria Fletcher
Coyote chases his tail under the street lamp convinced he can catch what he cannot release the footfalls behind him fingers tapping his shoulder his deceased father’s family still whispering his name the one clue they left him one half of himself in the white chiseled letters on the white...
We Are Stardust
Current Issue / Issue 71 / Sept 2022 / Nonfiction

We Are Stardust

by Anna Vodicka
Skin: our thin animal hide. An organ on the outside. Our blood running in blue rivers just below the surface. How vulnerable we are. We blister, burn, cut and heal, stretch and scar. From excess of elbow, to thin skin of forearm, to the relative roughness of the palm—note how...
Like the Flowers
Current Issue / Issue 71 / Sept 2022 / Nonfiction

Like the Flowers

by Shaindel Beers
The gladioli refuse to bloom, indistinguishable from the volunteer corn stalks that sprouted after squirrels and doves threw corn from the porch feeders. I bought these gladioli greedily; the Westwinds Nursery was going out of business, and it was the final days, everything must go, so I took them—every single bulb...
What I Did Not Yet Know
Current Issue / Issue 71 / Sept 2022 / Nonfiction

What I Did Not Yet Know

by Kristin M. Distel
When surgeons wheeled away my sister, her twenty-five-year-old body so tiny and wracked with illness that there was room for a second body on the gurney, I thought about throwing myself onto the bed next to her, remembered how doctors said, even before she was born, that her life would...
Author’s Note: The Elevator Pitch
Current Issue / Issue 71 / Sept 2022 / Nonfiction

Author’s Note: The Elevator Pitch

by Lori Jakiela
Writers, like Hollywood people, are supposed to have an elevator pitch—a line you say when you’re stuck in an elevator with your dream agent, or, better, Sean Penn, that rough angel, or Wes Anderson, or Jane Campion. Not Harvey Weinstein, that skin tag, dear god. I lived in New York...
Boot
Current Issue / Issue 71 / Sept 2022 / Nonfiction

Boot

by Tyler Mills
Last night, I checked into this hotel at 3 a.m. after checking out of the other hotel in Albuquerque where a spry cockroach jumped—flying, really—from underneath the pillow to the bedside table during my routine bed bug check. I’d talked my way out of my Hotwire booking standing in the...
The Once Wife
Current Issue / Issue 71 / Sept 2022 / Nonfiction

The Once Wife

by Heidi Fettig Parton
BERLIN is still one city in the early morning hours of August 13, 1961, just before hastily installed barbed wire slices it in two. If there is no before and no after, then what remains? Me. Here. Bookending the last seat in a row of five chairs placed at the...
Spoiler
Current Issue / Issue 71 / Sept 2022 / Nonfiction

Spoiler

by Ralph James Savarese
 Endings to be useful must be inconclusive. —Samuel R. Delaney, The Straits of Messina I In the documentary short The Lion’s Mouth, Scottish actress and director Marianna Palka decides to get tested for Huntington’s disease. The condition runs in her family; it doesn’t walk. Doctors describe the disease as akin...
Seven Women
Current Issue / Issue 71 / Sept 2022 / Nonfiction

Seven Women

by Mika Sutherland
We are in our twenties, thirties, forties. Our Pantones are honey, brown, sand, cream, pink. We have children. We have stepchildren. We have no children. We are frightened that if we have children they will rip us open, and we will hate them. We are in open relationships. We are...
The Base Note
Current Issue / Issue 71 / Sept 2022 / Nonfiction

The Base Note

by Meg Senuta
Every voice sounds a chord. Every voice has notes and layers, the way fragrances do: the top note, the one you notice first, is light, citrus; the middle note, the heart, is resonant like cinnamon, jasmine; and the base note leaves the lasting impression, a weighted blanket of sandalwood and...
How Daylight Saving Ends
Current Issue / Issue 71 / Sept 2022 / Nonfiction

How Daylight Saving Ends

by Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach
You died, my son exhales, a week before his fifth birthday and an hour before the clocks turn back, because a man in New Zealand wanted more sunshine—not time to be with his children, but to go bug-hunting after work. You keep dying, he repeats, every time I close my...
Agostino Road
Current Issue / Issue 71 / Sept 2022 / Nonfiction

Agostino Road

by Angela Morales
I am sitting now on the warm sidewalk in front of our brown duplex surrounded by spikey balls dropped from the tree my mother calls our Liquidambar. My tree feels alive like a grandmother as it trembles its soft leafy hands, hands that shield my sidewalk from the hot sun....
Games
Current Issue / Issue 71 / Sept 2022 / Nonfiction

Games

by Jennifer Battisti
My dad carries a trophy over the threshold and into our living room—a glinting gold whirly bug gleaming between two pillars. It shines the way I want to shine in his arms. My older sister and I inspect the inscription on the little plaque: 1985 Las Vegas Whirlyball Champion. Mom...
Latest Issue
Issue 71 / September 2022

Issue 71 / September 2022

September 12, 2022
Powerful new essays from Daisy Hernandez, Julie Marie Wade, Harrison Candelaria Fletcher, Shaindel Beers, Angela Morales, Jennifer Battisti, Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach,  Kristin M. Distel, Anna Vodicka, Mika Sutherland, Meg Senuta, Ralph James Savarese, Heidi Fettig Parton, Tyler Mills, and Lori Jakiela. Plus stunning photos from Amy Selwyn.   
Craft Essays

Craft Essays

September 12, 2022
New in our Craft section, Rebecca McClanahan encourages nonfiction encounters of the deepest kind, Jill McCabe Johnson traces the literary roots of lost and found narratives (and offers useful prompts), and Aggie Stewart explores emotional pacing as it relates to writing about traumatic events.  
Teaching with Brevity

Teaching with Brevity

September 12, 2022
Our TEACHING RESOURCES pages offer a diverse set of resources for writers and teachers of the flash form, including teaching tools, syllabi, prompts, craft essays, subject and craft element indexes, and much more.    

 

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