Nudes by Elle Nash forthcoming from Short Flight/Long Drive, February 2021   In Elle Nash’s new story collection Nudes, readers are invited to share the lives of individuals who exist…

During the 2020 summer of COVID, empty nesters themselves, my octogenarian parents adopted baby birds. Here’s how it happened: in the process of cutting down dead wood from the weeping…

A few years ago, my husband and I were doing a deep-dive into Aimee Mann’s career. From’Til Tuesday through soundtrack songs, her cover of The Beatles’ “Two of Us” with…

In 1990, when Halley’s comet was 1.2 billion miles from the sun, an eight-year-old boy heard a song called “Halley Came to Jackson” on a new CD on his parents’…

Year fifteen at Fresno State: empty classrooms and empty nest. I begin the online semester fearing that my efforts to gain institutional support for outreach to southwest Fresno in the…

* * * You hold your clenched fist out to me, palm up, fingers wrapped around an unseen object. I hold your gaze as I unwrap them, one by one.…

I bought my first Hold Steady record at a Borders Bookstore in Vermont. From this sentence it’s probably fair to assume two things about me: I’m over the age of…

Ferdinand French, 1900 and Katherine French, 1912 Tales From the End of the Bus Line is a long-distance collaboration between daughter/father Megan and Bill Broughton to collect the many adventures…

In the summer of 2012, I quit my office job and spent a month and a half on a solo cross-country road trip moving from Pittsburgh to San Francisco. It…

Hull by Xandria Phillips Nightboat Books, October 2019 Bookshop / Amazon 80 pages – poetry   Hull, by Xandria Phillips, is an adroit, time traveling poetic structure that gracefully scoops…

Kate Gaskin is the author of Forever War, winner of the Pamet River Prize (YesYes Books 2020). Her poems have appeared in journals such as Guernica, Pleiades, Poetry Northwest, 32 Poems, Alaska…

floods my inbox dripping with spoken and unspoken criticism your poem is an anthem by that I mean rant the last sentence cliché don’t tell me what to think the…

[Image collage: “The Skin That Dies”] I found the Craigslist ad when I first showed up in Phoenix, in those early days that were spent scouring the internet, waiting for…

* * * And I wish for a moment, a moment to breathe. There is my teenage son, his knee bouncing under the kitchen table; my father, calling voicelessly for…