Explore

I arrived that evening barefoot and swathed in a sort of striped toga.

Lynn Freed reads from her collection, The Curse of the Appropriate Man.

I’m always driving through the desert, on the interstate’s black river.

Idzia is a little monster. For a monster, though, she’s awfully cute.

Maybe that’s what she feels, not stranded, but suspended in time.

I had pasted a pink Post-it to my phone screen that said DON’T DRINK.

I never entered no-man’s-land by any light brighter than the palest moon.

To keep the baby safe, we sealed the house as if against bad weather.

The everlasting shines through in the threshold between worlds.

My soul’s parts know little and don’t care whether I live or die.

I looked up how much everything would cost. Giving birth: $9,000.

Language seems accomplice to grieving, everything dissolves.

I answered, blood rushing like the shadow cast by a cloud of starlings.

He was shirtless and showcasing a large tattoo of the Twin Towers.

“Your mother’s fine,” Giuseppe said. “We’re all completely fine.”

The summer Victor died, his dad spoke to no one but the canaries he kept.

Before April rings the chime, she forces her way up out of herself.

I became a symbol of freedom, a miracle who had escaped the Devil.

Third Place

The small, inadequate marks follow the outline, things left behind.

Dad doesn’t believe I’m beauty queen material. I believe in myself.

The success is deserved, I think: certainly it was not lightly gained.

I am going to relate to you the most lamentable love affair of my life.

He is not in the position to lose a friend. Not when one is all he has.

What small song do you sing under your breath that is only for you?

Of all she taught me I like best the lore of spray-on cologne.

I’m guilty—locating my gratitude against someone else’s suffering.

Anything can happen because everything happens in New York.

Louise Farmer Smith

Her body had become a scale, a device for measuring grief.