Jieyan Wang
How the Body Contains Flight

Jieyan Wang - How the Body Contains Flight

Contest - Creative Nonfiction
Jieyan Wang is a writer and rising first-year college student at Harvard University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Pleiades, Passages North, Witness, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and… Read more »
Jeffrey Bean
The Best Day of Middle School

Jeffrey Bean - The Best Day of Middle School

Contest - Prose Poem
Jeffrey Bean is Professor of English/Creative Writing at Central Michigan University. He is author of two chapbooks and the poetry collections Diminished Fifth and Woman Putting on Pearls, winner of… Read more »
Patricia Patterson
The Daughters

Patricia Patterson - The Daughters

Contest - Flash Fiction
Patricia Patterson is a Mexican-American writer and editor based in Central North Carolina. Her fiction is featured or forthcoming in PANK, Porter House Review, EcoTheo Review, and elsewhere. When… Read more »

The Daughters - Flash Fiction

Patricia Patterson

After our breakups, we dance around our kitchens, boil pasta on our stovetops, spill dry parts on our linoleum floors, forget our passwords, curse our pasts, pour glass after glass of wine, so much wine we dance on tabletops, on toilet seats, on the hoods of strangers’ cars, where we reach for stars, slip on toilet seats, set off car alarms, spill red wine on our white shirts, scream at the top of our lungs, pour salt over our stains the way our abuelas taught us, throw our stained shirts in the wash, dance in our bras until the dryers stop spinning, spin records on our turntables, sing amor prohibido, sing we don’t need romance, we only wanna dance until Shania Twain says I need you, baby and it makes us cry, mascara running down our necks, and we call our exes, tell them we miss them, to fuck off, to never call us again, then we hang up on their sorry asses, call our tías who command us to quit our crying, wash our faces, try yoga, find a way out of our darkness, so we try yoga, forget our sadness for a while, repeat you are exactly where you need to be right now, make flan that’s good but nothing like our abuelas’, go for runs, go for bike rides, spin the pedals too fast, lose control, scrape our knees on concrete, call our madres, cry over voicemail, douse our knee caps in peroxide, dab our wounds with washcloths the way our madres used to, wring out our washcloths, wash the blood down our drains, tell our mamás we love them, more than anyone on this planet, say we’re sorry we ever cursed the color of our skin, we need you, we love you, Mamá.

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