Written By

Michelle Koubek

“Don’t take it so literally,” my husband said as he paced the pressed cedar of our living room floor.

“I’m not,” I retorted, pulling on my fingers like overcooked spaghetti. “You always assume I don’t get it.”

“So, you know that there’s not actually a ghost in the attic?” he frowned, which could mean a hundred things.

“Of course,” I said, because I’d seen the ghost in other places, too. The attic was not where it lived.

Written By

Nnadi Samuel

On transit, a girl fetches her hand from the side of her body,

                                                & shoves it into my mouth to know what lakes in its abyss.

meets it scoured clean of sound. an untorn language floating on the surface.

                                                I chew around a carcass of grudge these days.

whatever I hold with an effort to feed, loses its life before the gnawing.

Written By

Yoda Olinyk

I just want some soup that’s been made with clean hands. Moments after the text comes in, there is a pot on my stove with a whole chicken cuddled next to carrots and celery. Our mother taught us to always, always keep a chicken in the freezer. I’ve lost track of the qualities are because of my mother and which ones are despite her.

Written By

Karie Anne Yingling

As a child, did you ever pick up something, turn it around or upside down, and want to figure out how it worked? Maybe take the back off, open the top, or even bust it open to pieces to see what’s inside? That was me as a kid: the one who broke the toys just to see how they worked in the first place. At two years old, I was the kid who insisted on walking around to the back of the Ferris wheel to see how it worked before I would get on it and ride. Once I understood how it worked, I hopped right on. At four, I figured out how to navigate my hometown from a booster seat in the back of an old wood-paneled minivan and taught my parents some faster and more direct routes around the place they’d been living and driving all their lives. That was all, of course, having never been given a map.

Written By

Samuel Samba

A mushroom thrives in my backyard, fruiting twin bodies.

each, soap-soft in decomposing—

we sought newer ways to give name to the similarity in their rot.

here, I renounce despair

yet, cannot teach the stem of my body to bend towards light.

with each passing day, I strive to be everything but a gut-punch—

aimed at the jaw of teenagers wasting away on a plain field.

I kill the effort to hold my parents to a grudge.

no one born womb-tearing is innocent of this.

Written By

Amanda M. Blake

whisper it to the trees

the rumor mill will be buzzing

from honeycomb to mycelium

channels but no one understands

what passes through breeze or spore

sew your tongue to the top of your mouth

choke your neck with ivory teeth

weave a spider's knot between your lips

burn wax over the seam you'll never

tell again never ever pinky swear promise

hands clasped and chest tight with tears

Written By

Rochelle M. Anderson

Lasagna, taste the gooeyness on your fork.

Aphasia hides your speech, reading, and writing.

Lasagna is a stacked surprise.  Baked to

perfection in 375-degree oven, until sauce

and cheese bubble over.  Appears as simple

pasta, but as you slice and look at the cross

section, there are layers upon layers

Written By

Pixie Bruner

Just sacks of organs and various fluids, pressurized and pumping.

Air gaskets operating from first non-liquid inhalation to death rattle.

Muscles, connective tissues, wrapped in parcels by fascia.

We are marvelous machines of foamy, bubbly, tacky, slick, gelatinous stuff.

Written By

Sara Beth Brooks

My father performs open heart surgery on me 

without any medical training. Cracks the sternum

with the busted edge of a tequila bottle. No anesthetic 

– just the promise that he's doing this out of love.

Written By

Denise Noe

People with disabilities face many problems, some intrinsic to the disability, some the result of living in a world designed for those without disabilities, and some the result of prejudice. LGBT people have special reason to sympathize with the disabled, since there are inherent similarities between the difficulties faced by both minorities. Indeed, there is a significant overlap between the LGBT and disabled worlds, as disabilities are more common among LGBT people than among the general population. The converse is also true: disabled people are more likely to identify as a sexual minority than are abled people.

Written By

Alison Watson

My sister Beth and I never really got along. As kids, she liked Barbies, I liked sports. She was a “goody-goody” (my label for her); I broke every rule I came across.

As teenagers and young adults, our divide became even wider. Beth excelled academically, did well in college and graduate school, met a great guy, and started a successful career.

I became an unemployable alcoholic and drug addict, spent most of my time on bar stools, committed welfare and credit card fraud to manage a roof over my head, and started making the rounds of psych wards by the time I was 22.

For many years, my parents dreaded the late-night phone calls that informed them I was in another psychiatric hospital, had tried to commit suicide, or was stranded somewhere (Yugoslavia, Colorado, Dallas), and needed money to get home.

Written By

Shantell Powell

I’ve always been viewed with suspicion, longsuffering, and

irritation by a lot of other people. I’m hyper. I’m outspoken. I’m blunt. I’m loud. I take things too literally. I ask too many questions. I’m kinda...much. And even as a little kid I knew it. I knew I was weird, talked too much, and that the words and noises pouring out of my mouth in a cascade were drowning whatever empathy others might feel for me. I saw faces harden, eyes roll, smiles shrivel into white-lipped aggravation, yet still my words fountained out of me in an attempt to appease, amuse, or elicit something other than hatred or disinterest. 

I learned to shut my mouth sometimes. I binged and purged on words, babbling nonstop some days, growing nonverbal on others. I learned to go within.

Written By

Anna Welter

My parents argue about which parts of me were gifts from them

and I wonder if the daughter

they were supposed to have

is enjoying her time in fairie land.

My mother says I have his eyes, green and near-sighted

and I search for fairie circles

to bring me somewhere

that feels more like home.

Written By

Eli. Underwood

beyond trauma, a place

not quite understood. There’s no map, no path. Mystery

is a savage freedom, a needle to stitch

the bones to the soul again, outside the systems

which warn us we should never,

ever tell

the truth of being unstitched. Ignore them.

What’s gone is gone. We can’t process trauma

within the same systems that create it. We run outside

Written By

Teresa Milbrodt

It took forever to convince Grandma to record cooking videos. I tried not to use words like “legacy” and “tradition” since that would make her think about not being around forever, but I’m more uncomfortable with the idea than she is.

“Why do you a video?” she says when I arrive to tape another recipe. “Just learn by doing like I did with my mom and grandma.”

“You don’t have anything written down,” I say.

“It’s up here.” She taps her head. You know Grandma is old school and there’s nothing wrong with that, but I want precision, teaspoons and tablespoons and cups. I hope the videos will help me translate what she means by a palm, a pinch, a handful, how much flour she dumps into the bowl until it’s “enough.”

Written By

Kym  Cunningham

Plants she touched withered.

Let’s not be dramatic: she wasn’t death incarnate. Life is rarely so theatrical, even if she preferred it that way. A beauty in tragedy: like she were a narrative, to be staged or contained on a page. Legible.

But humans were messy. And she was, if nothing else, most humanly human. No immortal death-god here.

Her touch desiccated, that death of not-enough. Vine leaves curled and browned, stems dissolved into dust, as though she sucked out their water through the whorls of her fingers. A flood of her own. She wondered what else might get caught in the crossflow—and whether it spoke of the collapse underneath.

Written By

Karol Olesiak

witch hunters are fountain of youth seekers

lab coats, x rays, MRI memorandum

superiority,  disdain,              perceived

ignorance,              lethargy. witch’s marks

littering the hospital hallways. inability

to feel pin pricks        discoverable          disrobing

subjects harboring marks. villages

scapegoats:               wretched,            wracking

Written By

Bailey Quinn

What do you do when the person

Who died left

You behind in

                                                                Their body?

When you don’t

Recognize these

Hands, these

People, this

                                                                Language?