Creative Nonfiction

Selected by Sonya Huber

from “Hair”

Ciara Alfaro

University of Minnesota

Mid-American Review

Before I knew how to ask for what I wanted—before I knew that I wanted—Grandma and Mom would make my hair decisions for me. I would sit in the salon chair and watch them chat until Mom slipped away to get her hair dyed blonde next door. It would take me years to realize that they don’t always like each other, my mom and Grandma. That they have differently stubborn temperaments and a long sprawling history, with whiteness and brownness and belonging a running undercurrent between them. Grandma thinks whiteness is critiqueable. Mom thinks she will never fully belong to our brown family. This bit of their relationship only shows its face every couple of years and each time, my body sits as evidence that they’re both right.

from “The Archer”

Jacob M. Hall Texas Tech University Colorado Review

My father has left the church, started living in motel rooms. I think this has always been a dream of his. There’s an impermanence to his favorite places. Cars, motels, trailers. Perhaps he appreciates the ability to escape at any time. I want to escape. I’m in one of the rooms with him for the night, another short visit. He’s not well. The carpet issues blooms of smoke when I sit, the TV lacks any interesting channels, and my father is high as a kite. I don’t know what he’s on, or where he got it, but I recognize the lulling drone in his voice, the occasional nodding of his head, the way he seems surprised to see me every time I speak. I worry that he won’t be able to get dinner tonight, but for all his flaws, he always springs to action when I say I am hungry. And so we pack into his little Geo Prizm and head to the buffet down the road. It does not occur to me to be worried about him driving high. All I care about is getting food, and besides, the only alternative is me.

from “Lost Wingman”

Laura Joyce-Hubbard

Northwestern University

Reed Magazine

We learned to call out “Barrier, Barrier, Barrier,” over the radio, if we had to abort a takeoff. Our jets were so fast—it could be impossible to stop on the runway once we accumulated speed. 

This containment—what to do when reaching the limits of either jet or weather—made me feel safe. Gave me boundaries. But as I thought about my brother, I didn’t feel he had the same sense of known limits in his world that could help contain the power—as strong as my jet’s afterburner thrust—of addiction. There was nothing external, like my runway barrier that would be thrust into his spiraling path and force him to stop. As I watched his addiction unfold, I observed an intensifying pattern of risk. Like he was a hurricane hunter, riding the edge of gale-force winds. Even a night in jail didn’t make him stop. His addiction, to me, felt like a tropical storm, gathering speed, intensifying inward toward hurricane status.

from “??k?y??k??t??”

Kanyinsola Olorunnisola University of Alabama Tampa Review

My mother’s kitchen is my longest-surviving memory of learning about self. My current understanding of my roots can be traced back to those nights when I would sit on an àpótí next to her, in the waning candlelight, some apala music from the 70s on the radio, watching how beans became m??ím??í, how corn flour turned àgìdì, how yam flour mated with boiling water and thickened into àmàlà, how our people made their own sustenance from the grains of the earth. And so, in all my years, I have come to know this to be true: no matter how far flung you are from home, from the city that birthed you, the taste of your mother’s kitchen will always remain on your tongue. This has taken some learning.

Fiction

Selected by Gwen Kirby

from “A Vanishing (30 Accounts of the Disappearance of Dorothy Arnold, Each Equally True)”

Blake Chernin Purdue University

Iron Horse Literary Review

Consider: Dorothy Arnold vanished. Dorothy Arnold vanished from the corner of fifth and twenty-seventh. Dorothy Arnold vanished from the corner of fifth and twenty-seventh in Manhattan on December 12, 1910. She was last seen dressed hat to ankle in blue. They call her The Vanished Heiress, and the fact of her vanishing metastasizes through her life, eating up everything else and replacing it with a gasp of cold air. Dorothy Arnold vanished twice.

from “Wisdom Teeth”

Liina Koivula

Eastern Washington University

Puerto del Sol

Patsy and Oscar were getting serious, maybe even falling in love. Patsy dyed her hair black and started wearing vintage polyester dresses in day-glo floral patterns, floor-length but cut off ragged above her knees. Oscar was shorter than her, with crooked teeth and trendy grandpa glasses. He brought her herbal nosegays with lavender and lemon balm from his garden, raw organic chocolates from the food co-op, eggs laid by the hens in his backyard. I’d recently liberated myself from an entanglement with a newly-out long-haired butch who did that kind of stuff, but did it wrong: bouquets from the grocery store florist, carnations dyed unnatural colors, like a stepdad gives a kid after a tap dance recital. It was embarrassing. But if I met someone like Oscar, I might become the kind of swoony jerk who found candy and flowers romantic. For the time being, I was enjoying spreading my limbs to the far corners of my own bed, answering to no one but Patsy for my whereabouts, supporting local businesses (mostly bars) with the generous credit limits on my multiple credit cards. I was resolutely single.

from “Deborah Forever”

Kasey Peters

University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Hayden’s Ferry Review

I take in the sight of her as if I were not her mother: I can appreciate the gravity of her dark eye wells, the distinction of four earrings up one ear and the strange glamor of her thick fingers maneuvering a cigarette. Cowboy. There it is: that same something about her. It could have been beauty, if only she’d grown in that direction. Instead she chose this. I shouldn’t have let you play softball, I said to her one night, one early night, and she was hurt for a moment before she rolled off the deck laughing.

from “For Someone”

Madeline Simms University of Alabama Quarterly West

Someone invites Abandon over for dinner. Together they Dance the Salad Dance, romaine flying wildly, tomatoes landing in small splats near the cucumbers. Together they mix up a salad dressing—olive oil and vinegar, salt and pepper. Abandon says to Someone, “When I am overwhelmed, I chop. I begin deliberate and controlled. Especially when it comes to things like onions. One wrong cut and you are in tears. Slowly, I allow the knife’s energy to build to the point of me, Abandon—one with the knife rocking back and forth beneath my palm until the desired size.”

Poetry

Selected by Jennifer Moore

from “Equinox”

Brian Czyzyk University of North Texas Tampa Review

Her ribs cradle more breath

than blood. Her hands grab at a downpour

of maple seeds, and she aims her ankles

at a noon-flushed cul-de-sac. She names

that place memory of toothache

and bramble-scratch, a kink at the back

of the throat, duskless and gray-puddled

and hollow as dove song.

from “Visiting a Friend on a Snowy Night”

Chengru He University of Utah Colorado Review

. . . The Jin Dynasty snow keeps falling. You stay in poetry

with Dai Kui, light him a cigarette; he pours you the snow-brewed tea,

in silence, both expecting an unpromised knock.

from “Countdown”

Carrie Johnson University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Quarterly West

. . . My hands fall asleep at the wheel, turn cadavers in the night, so numb I can’t recognize them as my own. You can’t take it with you, but who works for money, really? I want everything. Choices, safety, pleasure. Fuji apples traded for Honeycrisp, rocking chairs on porches, no check-engine light. All of it.