Dragana Lazici

      ice cream under the sun   the days are long but the years are short. seconds are tiny kitchen knives in my back. i stopped reading Dickinson, her voice is a sad parrot. i often imagine myself drowning in her punctuated chaos. the grass is...

Abigail Ottley

      BECAUSE When she is toddling small, she learns to hear real good because she cannot see. Faces, unless they come swimming up close. are a blur of piggy-pink and ice- cream. In the street, she doesn’t know, cannot be certain when to smile, when to...

Maggie Mackay

  Lesson   A cell, an upright piano. Sentence, one hour. I’ve never shown any interest in music, never tapped out thumps on the dining table, stamped out beats in my scrappy shoes or hummed silly tunes. The teacher is an old spindly man. Grim, out of a...

Natasha Gauthier

      Skins My mother had a handbag made from the skin of a female cobra her brother killed in the garden. No rrkk-tkking Kipling mongoose to protect her, just my fierce uncle, bantamweight in a stained banyan brandishing cricket bat and torch. Rain...

Romy Morreo

  Generational Divide She only speaks to me these days through groaning floorboards in the night and slammed doors. Through eye-rolls, half-eaten dinners, and empty packets of birth control pills. Her friends and their mothers are ghosts, glimpses of them...