Category: Blogs

Loneliness Looks Like Hunger

Cynthia Good

For a while, you lived in a room without a TV Or a garbage disposal, and it was so quiet You heard the refrigerator moan, two dogs  Barking at each other in the alley, somebody  On the roof watering. You’ve been alone all day Except for 10 minutes when the Read more

Cynthia Good

Cynthia Good is an award-winning poet, journalist, former TV news anchor, and author of the chapbook, What We Do with Our Hand published last fall by Finishing Line Press. She has written seven books and launched two magazines. Her poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in numerous journals including Tupelo Quarterly, Terminus Magazine, Waxing and Waning. Her full-length manuscript, In The Thaw of Day, has just been accepted for publication.

A Love Deserved

Lindsay N Marshall

Sebastian points to the letter T, alone in the center of the child-sized magnetic white board. T for Tyler. T for tired. I sit criss-cross applesauce next to my four-year-old charge, who is excited and proud he’s found the letter that’s been missing from the set for days, and glance Read more

Lindsay N Marshall

Lindsay N Marshall is a student pursuing her MFA in Fiction at Arcadia University. She helps care for children with special needs by day, and writes about women who fight back by night. Currently querying her first novel, she’s previously written pop culture features and personal essays for newspapers and online magazines. When not writing, she’s often found rewatching Supernatural or crowdsurfing at a punk show.

Shapeshifting

Judith Staff

The shape of heavy tears streaking down, earthwards, journeying to find our loved ones faces, again The shape of trembling lips the very moment we recall their forevermore absence as we write the date, on this day their birthday The shape of the book on the shelf in the store, Read more

Judith Staff

Judith Staff’s background is in teaching and early years education. She still teaches occasionally, though now her main focus is in child welfare and safeguarding children. Her work includes delivering training, presenting at conferences, and engaging in collaborative projects with schools around child abuse awareness and sexual violence prevention. She enjoys writing blogs and poetry on topics she feels passionate about. Judith loves running, gym classes and karate. She is married to an art lecturer and they live in Northamptonshire, England with their three free-spirited children, a 12- year-old son, and daughters aged 11 and 9.

Lessons in Healing From the Aisles of Target

Summer Hammond

August 2016             I’m kneeling in the aisle like a worshipper dropping tears into the white ceramic shell of an armadillo.             What else would you do on your inaugural Target run in a new town you thought you would love but don’t even like? Read more

Summer Hammond

Summer Hammond grew up in rural Iowa and Missouri. After parting ways with her faith, she went on to earn a BA in Literature, teach ninth grade reading, and achieve her MFA from the University of North Carolina-Wilmington. She is the author of three unpublished novels. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Sonora Review, StoryQuarterly, Moon City Review, and Tahoma Review. She is the winner of the 2023 New Letters Conger Beasley Jr. Award for Nonfiction.

A Bald Girl

Sarah M. Levy

My mom had it. I know she had hair in all of the pictures of her before I was born. I know she had hair when I was little. I know she got her hair done at Menage e Trois Coiffers on Burton Way, and I didn’t know what “Menage Read more

Sarah M. Levy

A Los Angeles native, Sarah M. Levy was an English teacher in NYC for 21 years. She is a founding member of the experimental theater company The New York Neo-Futurists, and a recipient of The NY Innovative Theater Award for Outstanding Performance Art Production. She has performed her work on Selected Shorts and at The Green Room 42, and she has been published in 225.Plays: By The New York Neo-Futurists from Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind. Sarah received her MA in English Literature from Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English, and her BA in English Language and Literature from The University of Chicago. A member of The Writers Studio at The Center for Fiction, she lives in Brooklyn with her husband and son.

After Hours

Kareem Tayyar

I’d arrived in Los Angeles two years earlier, on New Year’s Eve, 1979, after completing graduate work at the University of Minnesota and deciding that I wouldn’t survive another midwestern winter. So after a three-day road trip in my ex-husband’s Chevrolet Impala that included striking a deer in South Dakota, Read more

Kareem Tayyar

Kareem Tayyar's work has appeared in publications including Poetry Magazine, Prairie Schooner, Alaska Quarterly Review, and North Dakota Quarterly, and my most recent book, “Keats in San Francisco & Other Poems,” was published in 2022 by Lily Poetry Review Books. His poem, “Visiting My Father in Iran,” received the 2020 Glenna Luschei Poetry Prize from Prairie Schooner, and my coming-of-age novel, “The Prince of Orange County,” received the 2020 Eric Hoffer Prize for Young Adult Fiction.

FLEDGLING

Angel Rosen

When I was born, my mother clipped my wings. Just the red ones. I flapped and tapped on my incubator for six weeks until they released me into her arms, a pink infant in knots and a woman with scissors up her sleeve. Life as a cardstock canary, a polymer Read more

Angel Rosen

Angel Rosen is a poet living near Pittsburgh. She can be found at open mic nights, drag shows or writing poetry in the dark. She is passionate about mental health, queer friendship, and Amanda Palmer's art community. Her writing can be found at angelrosen.com.

The Catalogue of Men

Cynthia Good

Before sunrise I’m flipping through a catalogue of men,  A parade of men looking for relationships, super closeups, Guys in ball caps, blurry headed, sideways, in bed, crazy  Faces with monsters, in cubicles, beside lattice fences,  Strapped into car seats, in the shower, in private airplanes  And parking lots, with Read more

Cynthia Good

Cynthia Good is an award-winning poet, journalist, former TV news anchor, and author of the chapbook, What We Do with Our Hand published last fall by Finishing Line Press. She has written seven books and launched two magazines. Her poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in numerous journals including Tupelo Quarterly, Terminus Magazine, Waxing and Waning. Her full-length manuscript, In The Thaw of Day, has just been accepted for publication.