“ …women find autonomy in peripheral beauty and strange thoughts. “
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Via Leftwich
An Interview with Writer Hillary Leftwich on Her Book 'Ghosts Are Just Strangers Who Know How to Knock '
Hillary Leftwich’s multi-genre collection, Ghosts Are Just Strangers Who Know How to Knock (CCM Press/The Accomplices 2019), is frighteningly beautiful and natural in its scope of voices and reverberates long after its first read. Leftwich is an editor, organizer in her literary community, and an advocate for writers existing in liminal spaces. Here she shares about her book and an impulse to create from the beats of memory.
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via Shutterstock
On the Friend of My Life
Part of growing up with someone is learning how to grow apart too. When we started high school we drifted a little. Our senior year we had anatomy together and became friends again. We spent every morning together in the commons area eating breakfast. Our friend, Emily, dubbed us "The Breakfast Club" and decided which characters from the film we were. The night we graduated we all rode together to the local movie theater still in our graduation regalia and we watched back to back movies before going home. My own family had pizza and gathered together, but we went out together instead. I still think about it a lot: the way friends become family.
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Excerpts from "Dress Code Aquarium" by Benjamin Niespodziany
The doctor wasn't supposed to
but she prescribed herself
to try new things.
"Something new once a week,
repeat, repeat."
A Triptych of Fictions by Lauren Dostal
Buried under the snow, a hand. It crawled with fingertips as black as the hidden pavement. The man arising. The sun glaring on his home in the snow, turning it back into water. A car and then a crowd pass by and the man sits naked with his hand outstretched. Scars spiral up the muscles of his blue veined forearm--a tale he’d rather not tell and no one asks him anyway. There was a woman once, passing by she dropped a red kopeck in his hand and he thanked her. Such a strange piercing stare in her ice blue eyes bloodshot with last night’s memories still playing like a video tape across her retinas. Was he there? No, he was buried deep where no one could find him, and now his house was gone. He’d make another when the weather turned. Until then, he would sit with his hand outstretched and waiting. Maybe someone would take it.
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via Medium
Bay To Break My Mind: On the 50th Anniversary Celebration of the Summer of Love Being Shut Down
All I could feel for certain was that it certainly wasn’t "a happening" as the very un-groovy bellows got closer and louder still. So close now I could no longer ignore whatever the impending invasion was. I crept back up to the road’s edge, still remaining hidden behind the thick brush. As the ever-increasing loudness grew, other noises were revealed and morphed into a swirling soundscape mixing into 500.1 3-D audio channeling into the mixing board of my mind with all knobs twiddling. Rising low rumbles of many drums banging out of sync with high pitched whistles clattering atop like hard rain on a hot tin hangar roof.
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Rosita Delfino
What You Can Do
When your best friend is in a coma you can drive out to the suburban hospital after visiting hours; five weeks later, they know you're the closest thing to a husband she might have. After all, you two are not religious and only 23, sharing a February birthday, yours the 15th and hers the 21st. You can close the door of the room and scream wake up wake up wake up wake up. The way when she used to visit, you’d turn over your plump happy body towards her in the mornings, and wake her up by sticking your naked finger in her nose or ear, until she made that crying sound and stuffed her head under the pillow. The way you showered and then dripped wet hair into her open hand. Her tiny palm which you now squeeze, saying do you feel this do you feel this do you feel this; the way you too have lost feeling with her. The way you always told yourself you'd die if she died.
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It Follows (2015)
Give Me All Your Love, Prose Poem by Margaret Yapp
Margaret Yapp is a recent college grad working and living in Minneapolis. Her essays and poems have appeared in The Tishman Review, Midwestern Gothic, Driftward Press, and elsewhere.
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Noukka Signe
This Is My Secret That I Live With Every Day
Listening to my social work colleagues talk about clients: "She is nuts," "She is crazy," "Psycho!"
Shhhhh, stay silent. I have a secret.
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Aëla Labbé
Poetry By Emily Corwin
you felt me, you left me—moaning open in a landslide. I harden like grease
and there’s glimmer. the saplings anxious for ripping, cleaved the way you
like it. let’s say: you’re the woodsman and I am a girl, slipping in a magician
box, my bra cups filling out—buttermilk, tiny bow in the middle. you wield
a saw, a tremor—sung like choirs, biting through.