Hot Tin Roof

So I’m like eight, and my hair is slicked with Vitalis, and I’m riding in the back seat of our old Ford station wagon, surrounded by my brothers and my sister, my parents up front, my old man smoking Tareytons. He’s rolled the windows up tight to seal in the goodness like Tupperware, and we’re rolling down the Mass Pike to GG’s funeral.

hibernates inside his heart
for more than a month before
cautiously emerging on a bitterly
cold January evening as he rests
his forehead against the upstairs
bedroom window & watches
those first hesitant snowflakes

By Kathryn B. Jackson Your intuition might fail you. Your sniffing-dog sense for the perils of men — your extrasensory radar for the false love of fathers in particular, having known your own father’s false love — you could, at any instant, go noseblind, and get it wrong. There is always room for your human […]

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text] By Adam Prato “Trick or treat!” Something small and green dropped into the plastic bag Jennifer had held out. “What is that?” she asked. “A Brussels sprout,” said the man who had answered the door. Jennifer looked up. The man was a little fat and going bald, like an older version of her father. […]

By Akwi Nji My family is a family of women. Men were there; biology tells us they must have been. And they weren’t lazy. They were farmers and college professors, business owners. But, in the snapshots of my memory, they are all sitting on sofas while the women flutter through kitchens, sift through backpacks to […]

By Rachel Yoder What affable children these boys are. See how the clean one plays with the one who’s dirty. See how each of them is down on his knees — equals, they are — pushing the small wooden trains along the small wooden tracks. The room is silent save for their play, their horn-like […]

By David Duer The sky was a bruise the color of my wife’s arms after a tough day with the combatives at the nursing home. It was July, when the vegetation grows rank and you don’t even pretend to control it anymore. I’d left early from work, but by the time I got home, Pat […]

By Bogi Takács In memoriam Miklós Radnóti The flood comes; I am leaving. Mole tunnels crisscross the thick soil of the banks and spring lies in wait, ready to send the rolling, dirt-brown waters down from the Alpok carrying twigs and an all-human collection of trash: shopping bags, red flashes of cola bottles. A sound […]

By Cheryl Graham The Woods Memorial branch library, a small white stucco building, sits on a plat of North First Avenue that would have been considered the outer reaches of Tucson when the branch was opened in the late 1960s. The air inside is cool, but not cold, a respite from the desert heat. Natural […]

By Alexander McShane Bradbury Hot headed boy broke his arrows. He will shoot no more but instead sneak on them sparrows. Because the boy’s got a right to throw down his toys and take all the birds with his hands. When I asked him to take the dirt road to the hollow tree, where he […]

The Kitchen By Chris Wiersema Uh huh, yeah. No, I’m listening. Stuck at the office. Broccoli in the steamer in half an hour. Asshole boss—you said it first—deadline at nine so no later than ten. Chicken breast thawing in the sink.” Eleven year-old mumbled on the cordless, wiped afternoon Koz-Zone cartoons out of his eyes. […]