By M.R. Mandell after “Kissing” by Dorianne Laux Crying as they hope for blood, crying as they flush the strips, crying as they hide their bumps. They are crying in bathroom stalls, behind Sugarland’s Kroger store. They are crying on Houston corners, outside the boarded-up laundromat. They are crying in each other’s arms, at [...]
By Amy Cook We hadn’t had a proper winter, but spring arrived anyway, confoundingly on time. Whatever you might have read about autumn in New York, the first morning the rows of tulips open on Park Avenue, or when the purple hyacinth spirals up through a neighborhood garden, or that cloudless April morning when the [...]
By Tara Campbell The uterus is tired. The uterus is sorry but it can’t seem to stay in one place anymore, which isn’t surprising considering how often it’s been poked and prodded and pricked by congressmen’s pens. The uterus would like to get in a word of its own, just one, even edgewise just one [...]
By Katie Avagliano I'm not saying cannibalism is the only option. If we're talking animalistic magnetism—the old horizontal tango-—there are other ways to dispose of the sperm vehicles. Sure, arachnids control their own widowhood, and half of all Chinese mantises have copulations that end in the death of the male. In response, though, the male [...]
Because Extraordinary Times Require Extraordinary Adornment By Tracy Rose Stamper Welcome to RevlOff’s Lip Couture Counter, where science blends with art, topped off with attitude, to bring you colors to carry you through dizzying days. Our makeup counter’s mission is to challenge the slippery slope into post-truth society. By offering an honest line of honest [...]
By Penny Perry For my Aunt Leona Heyert Tarleton who died at age 33 We are looking at the mockingbird in the lemon tree. This is the first day of my cousin’s summer visit. I wriggle closer to her. “I know how my mother died,” my cousin whispers. The gazebo is the place for secrets. [...]
By Erin Edwards It is a simple act to stand in the middle of the road. Simple, but effective. A car either has to stop and wait or run you down—and it just wouldn’t do for a hearse carrying the body of a former government official to accelerate towards a woman in the middle of [...]
By Erica Goss I’m sixteen. School thinks I have the flu. I tell the doctor to knock me out. In the alley behind the clinic, men wait in cars. They leave their engines rumbling. Backseat speakers vibrate. My mother drives me home. I’m thirty-seven. Work thinks I had a miscarriage. I tell the doctor to [...]
Thoughts on walking by rippling grey water under a darkened sky In the days before stretch marks, second husbands, morning stiffness, encore careers. In the days when we couldn’t imagine finding weed and condoms secreted under our teenagers’ beds. Or knowing the location of every hidden bathroom in innumerable coffee shops, Whole Foods, Farmers’ Markets. [...]
By Kate LaDew In 1867, the first instance of a hero saving their sweetheart from an oncoming train after a dastardly villain tied them to the tracks debuted in the last scene of a New York stage play. The hero's sweetheart calls for help, while the hero, locked inside the train station, watches from a barred window, searching for [...]
By Penny Perry June 5, 1942 Dear Isabel, I drove my sister to the doctor’s in Los Angeles. It all happened so quickly. I promised to bring her a chocolate phosphate when it was over. She joked with the nurses. Told them if she puked from ether she would buy each of them a pair of [...]
Unlike the statistics above, our stories help humanize the theme of abortion, and this week we are sharing five of them, in poetry and prose, by Mileva Anastasiadou, Andrea England, Vicki Cohen, Heather Mydosh, and Penny Perry. Like every piece in the issue, each abortion decision is unique and intimate, and it is owned by only one person, [...]
By Mileva Anastasiadou She’s not that young, already in her mid-twenties, when the double lines appear on the test. She is careful enough most of the time, yet that’s how it goes; life happens and spoils all plans. At first, she’ll panic. That doesn’t mean much, her boyfriend will say; everybody panics at the prospect [...]
By Andrea England The baby born into a subway toilet between Harvard and Porter Baby with the too-big head and ears that flap in the wind from a smack Baby addicted to crack turned blue as a bruise in his birthday suit Baby unwanted and doesn’t know why His father raped his mother Baby taken [...]
By Vicki Cohen I am a nurse-midwife. For over thirty years, I provided prenatal care for pregnant women and welcomed new life. It was mostly happy work, but sometimes I’d find myself worrying about the women who lived in poverty or suffered from substance abuse, the thirteen-year-old who didn’t know she was pregnant until too [...]
