Concentric
Kathleen Nalley Around 11:30 p.m., after the Ringling Brothers Circus, a newborn was found by a janitor in the toilet at the Bilo Center in Greenville, S.C. Maybe the plunge from one body of water into another didn’t…
David
Ten Reasons Why I Can’t Have Your Baby
Lauren Housman 1. Because one day I’ll be standing in line somewhere and some presumptive, baby-loving, beyond-middle-aged woman (the same sort you overhear asking people about their grandchildren and, when she hears there aren’t any, moans “Oh, I’m so…
Hometown Market’s Delicious Fried Chicken
Mary Slebodnik Serves: Anyone willing to pay $23.00 a box ($11.99 after 7:00 p.m.) 1. Tie the apron. Stretch your fingers into the plastic gloves. Go to the cooler, that dark cell filled with raw meat in the…
Review of “The Mountain and the Fathers: Growing up on the Big Dry” by Joe Wilkins
Julia Stone In his memoir The Mountain and the Fathers: Growing up on the Big Dry, Joe Wilkins captures the raw reality of growing up in eastern Montana where the land is dry and the work hard, but the…
Review of “Rhyme’s Challenge: Hip Hop, Poetry, and Contemporary Rhyming Culture” by David Caplan
Sidney Kochman If you ask a modern poet about rhyme, she will most likely tell you that it is dead. Or that it only exists as an archaic curiosity. The consensus seems to be that rhyme has no place…
Review of “Shirley: A Novel” by Susan Scarf Merrell
Mariah Gese Shirley: A Novel will be released by Blue Rider Press on June 12th for $25.95. Shirley Jackson became a household name with her popular works The Lottery and The Haunting of Hill House, horror classics that…
Play Date
Megan Pinto Even as children we were more exposed, less beautiful at night. You remember what it was like, there, hidden under thin blankets in the summer when we wanted to sleep naked or float on rafts in your…
Sunday School
Megan Pinto These men in robes they told us once: the very nature of sin is contagious. One coughed in his hand and blessed the bread, God’s body is not contagious. They spoke of a snake racing through…
Review of “Verdun: The Longest Battle of the Great War” by Paul Jankowski
CJ Potter It is estimated that on February 21, 1916, the first day of the battle of Verdun, one million artillery shells fell. The fighting would go on, a war within a war, for 10 more months. The casualties…
Review of “The Great Glass Sea” by Josh Weil
Jerome Stenger Go to Google Maps (not right now, later), click satellite view, type Spain. Look to the southern coast, west of Almeria. Turn off the labels. What you’ll notice is a white patch, a salt flat. A bleached…