We ask you to pick a box when you submit us your writing: Poetry. Fiction. Nonfiction. You may have a fixed identity as a poet. You may feel that fiction is the most magical weapon for telling a story. You may want to capture a social movement through your nonfiction narrative. But what if you swim in between all of the genres and forms and…
The Dream of the Indies is Alive in Portland
Everything I knew about Portland I learned from two main sources: my best friend who lived here at the time (and has since moved to Florida) and the TV show Portlandia. My friend said the show paints a somewhat accurate picture of Portland culture, and having visited Portland prior to living here, I believed her. What Portlandia and my friend neglected to mention, however, is…
Coveting Apertures by Sarah Schubmehl
To be a man. to be two men, together. To feel absences filled— hard pressure, thrusting pain— to take pleasure without fear of fullness, without fear of my womb, without the threat of a body bloated with life. To never lie in bed, facedown, hand clutched against my stomach feeling the ache of a violated cervix, the angry uterine clench that follows satisfaction. To be…
Blackbird
Over the furrows of the northern field— a coded flash of blackbird wings. Memory bursts from the hedgerows: a pair of girls in skirts and knee socks and weed-flowered hair, a fawn decomposing in the ditch, wired to a slab of plywood, tattered pelt on thin bones. How to make sense of those rusted nails thrust into gangling newborn limbs to keep her in place?…
The Camera
An excerpt… Twenty odd years before and that truck was there for best friend. Pete. When I say I truly loved him, it means just that. I truly loved him. We was like brothers without the blood. Used to set up all night writing and singing songs and dreaming about being the next rock and roll Beethoven’s. That night so far away but I can…