7 in the City
7 in the City

7 in the City - 7 in the City

Project

A Multimedia Journalism Project “7 in the City” is a multimedia journalism project that explores what it is like to be a 7-year-old growing up in Baltimore today. In the Fall of 2017, Johns… Read more »
Rachel E. Hicks
Accumulated Lessons in Displacement

Rachel E. Hicks - Accumulated Lessons in Displacement

Poetry
Rachel E. Hicks’s poetry has appeared in Little Patuxent Review, Relief, St. Katherine Review, Gulf Stream, and other journals. She won the 2019 Briar Cliff Review annual fiction contest, and her… Read more »
Jim Beane
Close to Her Heart

Jim Beane - Close to Her Heart

Fiction
Jim Beane’s stories have appeared in numerous literary magazines, and the anthologies DC Noir and Workers Write: Tales from the Construction Site, winner of the 2017 Tillie Olsen Award for Creative… Read more »
Leslie Harrison
Fortune

Leslie Harrison - Fortune

Poetry
Leslie Harrison's second book, The Book of Endings (Akron 2017) was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her first book, Displacement (Mariner 2009) won the Bakeless Prize in poetry. Recent poems… Read more »
Steven Leyva
How Our Sons Learned to Fight

Steven Leyva - How Our Sons Learned to Fight

Poetry
Steven Leyva was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, and raised in Houston, Texas. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in 2 Bridges Review, Scalawag, Nashville Review, jubilat, Vinyl, and Prairie… Read more »
Linette Marie Allen
Old Testament on West Preston

Linette Marie Allen - Old Testament on West Preston

Poetry
Linette Marie Allen is earning an MFA in Creative Writing & Publishing Arts at the University of Baltimore. Recipient of a Betty Tarpley Turner Research and Travel Award for Poetry, she recently… Read more »
Michael Downs
Open House

Michael Downs - Open House

Creative Nonfiction
Michael Downs moved from Montana to Baltimore in 2007 to teach creative writing at Towson University, where he now directs the graduate program in professional writing. He has published three books,… Read more »
Kris Faatz
Stealing Glads

Kris Faatz - Stealing Glads

Fiction
Kris Faatz is a pianist and writer from Baltimore. Her short fiction has appeared in various journals including Kenyon Review Online, Reed, and 100 Word Story, and has received recognition in… Read more »
Grace Cavalieri
The Poem as a Pie

Grace Cavalieri - The Poem as a Pie

Essay

Grace Cavalieri is Maryland Poet Laureate. She’s visiting all Maryland counties working with teen poets. Read more »
Kathleen Hellen
Trail, cleft

Kathleen Hellen - Trail, cleft

Poetry
Kathleen Hellen is the author of The Only Country was the Color of My Skin, the award-winning collection Umberto’s Night, and two chapbooks, The Girl Who Loved Mothra and Pentimento. Featured on… Read more »

Open House

Michael Downs

What Sheri leaves open, her husband closes.

She walks away from an open fork-and-knife drawer. Michael shuts it before he stabs a hip on its corner. A room she left hours ago stays lit; he clicks the switch. She takes a glass from a cabinet; he bonks his head on the thrown-wide door, and it eases closed.

With spring’s first dogwood blossom, she unlocks windows, welcomes breezes into the house. He sneezes (hay fever).

The throw blanket on the easy chair? Her napkin on the table? He folds them. More than once (just yesterday) he has reached to put away a mayonnaise jar she’s left out, but the lid—resting there, not screwed into the threads—comes loose in his hand. The jar bounces across the counter.

The Sunpaper, when she’s done, lies helter-skelter across couch cushions. New Yorkers lie folded back over the spine where she stopped reading. Her clothes, when she dresses, hang loose. Her T-shirt collars are all vees. She’ll never wear a turtleneck.

Sheri opens, unfastens, switches on, loosens. Michael tightens, shuts, locks. He moves warily through the house. Danger, he knows, accompanies disorder.

She recalls their life in Montana where blue sky climbed up and always. Driving east out of the Rocky Mountains, she gasped at the unfolded plains, so vast and curving. Through a window over her kitchen sink, she saw an uncontained mountain, an everyday invitation from geography and distance. Ascend, it said. Go.

Now: Baltimore with its constricted roads and looming buildings, its leaden sky crowded out by smokestacks and too many trees. On Sefton Avenue, houses sit not much more than a broomstick-length apart. Through a window over her kitchen sink, she sees a garage built of brick. And next door, another garage built of brick.

But nearby, the grocery store parking lot sits atop a small rise. Sometimes, there to get eggs or bananas, she watches an exuberant full moon climb the open sky above the tire shop.

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