John Guzlowski: Fear
You could hear the fear in my mom’s voice. She feared everything, the sky in the morning, a drink of water, a sparrow singing in a dream, me whistling some stupid little Mickey Mouse Club tune I picked up on TV.
Cesare Pavese: Notes on Certain Unwritten Poems
The poem he will write is like a door, it opens out to his ability to create; and he will go through that door—he will write other poems, he will exploit the ground and leave it exhausted.
Sydney Lea: Poor, Sad Soul
I’d seen that balding woman before, the one I watched as she transferred a few small sacks of groceries from her shopping cart to her Kia Soul, a car I considered too young for her.
Joseph Bathanti: Maz’s Homer
Sister Ann Francis, my teacher, whom I do not like at all, though she will not prove the worst of them, slips us word that Sister Geralda, the ferocious school principal, who teaches eighth grade, has granted amnesty for the last ten minutes of the school day. We are to hurry home to witness the climax of the World Series.
M. C. Benner Dixon: Will Pull Weeds for Cash
It was a good summer job for a college kid. A quick drive down Old Plains Road, past the AT&T tower, and pull in at one of the innumerable fieldstone … Continue reading
Dawn Potter: Don’t Tell Me You Don’t Know What Love Is
I think back to those nights in Buck Lane, the melodramas of sex and desire, the intense affections but also the cruelties … the ruthlessness of self-absorption.
Frank Lehner: Mrs. Nussbaum’s Monkey
Pops never said much, but there he was in his T-shirt and loose boxers telling Jessers about the Easter Tuesday night he lost his mother and taking the streetcar to go to work because there was nothing to do until the next day, and the plant owner only gave two days off for deaths.
Michael Simms: Baron Wormser (February 15, 1948 – October 7, 2025)
Although history will have the final word on who among us is read by future generations, I’ll put my money on Baron. His writing represents the best of the American spirit.
Baron Wormser: On a Sentence by Albert Camus
Sometimes, the illness of our world, the death-in-life that turns nature into nothing more than the source of raw material, seems so boundless that throwing the lasso of language on it seems impossible.
H.G. Reza: Living While Brown in America
Walking through a Home Depot parking lot while being brown raises enough reasonable suspicion in an immigration agent’s mind to cause my detention for a citizenship check…
Charlotte Matthews: Fog Count at Fluvanna Women’s Correctional Center
…pregnant women are shackled even in labor. They are allowed to have their babies with them for one week, then they are taken away. Most will never see their children again
Frida Berrigan: Preparing for Scarcity
The truck wheel’s inner tube was right in front of me, no longer half-submerged in the pond’s late summer muck. After so many hot weeks without rain, the water had dried up and the garbage was completely exposed.
James Crews: Light and Dark
Half-awake, I lose myself in a pool
of late morning sun and leaf-shadows
flashing on the floor outside my bedroom,
what the Japanese call komorebi—light
and dark held in the same container
of a single moment, as we hold them in us,
John Guzlowski: Hope Is Our Mother
A question I get often about my Polish parents is what kept them going during the war and after the war.
