Joanne M. Clarkson
The Stone Masons

Joanne M. Clarkson - The Stone Masons

Contest - 1st Place
Joanne M. Clarkson’s fourth poetry collection, Believing the Body, was published in 2014 by Gribble Press. She was awarded a 2014 GAP grant from Artist Trust to complete her next full-length volume.… Read more »
Colleen Abel
Remake: The Kiss

Colleen Abel - Remake: The Kiss

Poetry
Colleen Abel is the author of Housewifery, a chapbook (dancing girl press, 2013). A former Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellow, her work has appeared in numerous venues including The Southern Review,… Read more »
Paige Towers
The Cooldown

Paige Towers - The Cooldown

Creative Nonfiction
Paige Towers earned her B.A. from the University of Iowa and her MFA from Emerson College, where she also taught Creative Writing and Composition. She currently lives in New York City, teaches in the… Read more »
Stephanie Lenox
The Take This Job and Shove It Ode

Stephanie Lenox - The Take This Job and Shove It Ode

Poetry
Stephanie Lenox is the author of the poetry collection Congress of Strange People (Airlie Press) and the poetry chapbook The Heart That Lies Outside the Body (Slapering Hol Press). Poems from a… Read more »
Vickie Fang
My Last Chance

Vickie Fang - My Last Chance

Fiction
Vickie Fang is a reformed trial lawyer with a recent MFA degree. She is now writing full time and has completed a literary thriller about two antagonists from the Chinese Cultural Revolution who meet… Read more »
Jane O. Wayne
If Mourning

Jane O. Wayne - If Mourning

Poetry
Jane O. Wayne is the author of four books of poetry, the latest of which is The Other Place You Live (Mayapple Press, 2010). A poem of hers along with an interview appeared in Catherine Rankovic’s… Read more »
Kate Wheeler
Hate It Here

Kate Wheeler - Hate It Here

Fiction
Kate Wheeler grew up in North Carolina among green things. She received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, and her work has appeared in Electric Literature's Recommended Reading and The Westchester… Read more »
Michelle Bracken
Eating Together

Michelle Bracken - Eating Together

Creative Nonfiction
Michelle Bracken is a fiction candidate in the MFA program at California State University, San Bernardino. Her work has appeared in Litro Magazine. Read more »
Mark Pritchard
Bullet in the Back

Mark Pritchard - Bullet in the Back

Contest - 3rd Place
Mark Pritchard is the author of two books of short stories, How I Adore You and Too Beautiful and Other Stories. His short fiction has been published by Crony, New Lit Salon, Fiction Attic, and… Read more »
Jennifer Givhan
Ritual With Fish Water

Jennifer Givhan - Ritual With Fish Water

Poetry
Jennifer Givhan was a PEN/Rosenthal Emerging Voices Fellow and a 2015 National Endowment for the Arts poetry fellowship recipient, as well as the 2013 DASH Literary Journal Poetry Prize winner, an… Read more »
Mitchell Untch
It’s Summer This Dream

Mitchell Untch - It’s Summer This Dream

Poetry
Mitchell Untch has been published in The Los Angeles Review, New Millennium Writers Contest, The Monadnock Anthology, Nimrod Intl., The Wisconsin Review, Out of Ours, Aurorean, The Unrorean… Read more »
Daniel Enjay Wong
Heart of Glass

Daniel Enjay Wong - Heart of Glass

Fiction
Daniel Enjay Wong received his BA from Stanford University and plans to attend medical school. His stories have appeared in Tin House, PANK, Spork Press, Monkeybicycle, JMWW, and elsewhere. He lives… Read more »
Mark Mitchell
Foreign Hand

Mark Mitchell - Foreign Hand

Poetry
Mark J. Mitchell studied writing at UC Santa Cruz under Raymond Carver, George Hitchcock, and Barbara Hull. His work has appeared in various periodicals over the last thirty-five years as well as the… Read more »
William Black
The Pleasure Dome

William Black - The Pleasure Dome

Fiction
William Black's fiction and critical essays have appeared in Crazyhorse, Threepenny Review, Southern Review, The Sun, World Literature Today, Boulevard, and elsewhere. Read more »
J.R. Tappenden
R is for Rhoda Consumed by a Fire

J.R. Tappenden - R is for Rhoda Consumed by a Fire

Poetry
J.R. Tappenden is the founding editor of Architrave Press. She earned an MFA in poetry from the University of Missouri – St. Louis where she also served as the university’s first Poet Laureate.… Read more »
Bill Snyder
Beep

Bill Snyder - Beep

Contest - 2nd Place
Bill Snyder has published in Atlanta Review, Poet Lore, Folio, Cottonwood, and Southern Humanities Review among others. He was the co-winner of the 2001 Grolier Poetry Prize, and the winner of the… Read more »
Dani Sandal
(dis) Connect

Dani Sandal - (dis) Connect

Fiction
Lately (2012 or forthcoming), you can read Dani Sandal in the Raleigh Review, Adirondack Review, New Orleans Review, Puerto del Sol, Monkeybicycle, Camroc Press, Mad Hatter's Review, PANK, Doctor T.J.… Read more »

Hate It Here

Kate Wheeler

Alison, Lisen and me on Highway 54, driving west out of town. Alison drives with one hand on the wheel, leaning back in her seat. Lisen rides shotgun, and she and Alison balance their wrists on the edges of the open windows and smoke. When a song we all know comes on the stereo, Alison and Lisen make their thumbs and their first two fingers, cigarettes in between, into guns and pump them out the windows in time with the chorus: puh puh puh –chk CHING- take your money.

It is fall. The highway is empty. We pass the flat brown fields, the tall silent trees. In the car it feels like something is happening. It feels like solitude and company at the same time. James has been gone for six months, and lately I cannot stand to be with people. I cannot stand to be alone.

We are looking for pumpkins to carve and have glowing about the house we live in together. We have been meaning to make this trip for weeks, but things come up. We have work. We have papers due. We are tired. There is some party.

When Lisen and Alison are getting ready to go out at night they take ages in the bathroom, changing sweaters, curling hair or straightening, adding eyeliner. I sit on the floor in the hallway. We can all see each other in the mirror. We talk. When we are hours late, Lisen says, “Let’s go, let’s go, it’s dark at the bar,” and we collect our bags and leave the house.

We are never on time. The longer we stay in this town, the worse it gets. Lisen and Alison have been here for five years. I have been here all my life.

Now, in the car, we pass a sort of shack, brown and set back from the road, a white sign: BOBS TUESDAY BINGO NIGHT BUDWEISER 50¢.

“I’ve always wanted to go there,” Lisen says. “I’ve always wanted to go there for bingo night.”

Lisen is tall. Her hair is brown and golden. She has a mild voice and a mild expression, and when she speaks you listen.

“Let’s do it,” Alison says. “Let’s go on Tuesday.”

“Well,” Lisen says. “You want to?”

We shoot down the road. The bar is behind us.

“It’s all the way out here,” Lisen says. “How would we get home?”

“I’d drive home,” I say.

I drive when no one else can, when they’ve all been drinking for hours. Once suddenly at midnight we were hungry, and I drove Alison and Lisen through town to the dumpster behind the Harris Teeter. Lisen rode shotgun.

“Left lane,” she told me. “Stoplight.”

“You drive better than I can,” I said. “Even drunk.”

We returned to the house with three trash bags full of pastries and bread, poptarts, ritz crackers, frozen pierogies. We stood on the front porch and passed around one cherry danish, left the rest sitting out there for the raccoons.

“We should go to that bar right now,” I say. “Let’s go right now.”

Alison slows and makes a U-turn. We head back to the brown shack of a bar. She pulls over onto the highway’s grassy shoulder and shuts off the engine. We look out.

In the gravel parking lot are three pick-up trucks, shining and silent.

“I don’t know,” says Lisen. “I don’t really want to go in there without a man.”

“What?” I say. “What could happen? It’s four o’clock in the afternoon.”

“Yeah,” says Lisen, still looking.

“We could call Andrew,” says Alison. “He would come out here with us.”

I call Andrew. No answer. I leave a message. We sit in the car and look out.

“It’s just that it’s out here in the middle of nowhere,” Lisen says.

When Lisen is bored or tired and ready to leave a place, some party or bar where we are, she says, “I hate it here,” and we know it is time to move on.

Alison turns her key and the engine makes its low noises. “We’ll find pumpkins,” she says. “And if Andrew calls he can meet us at the bar on our way back.”

We slide out onto the gray road again and drive for miles, quiet. Andrew does not call us back. Not a pumpkin in the North Carolina countryside, for some reason. The car’s stream comes in the front windows and blows over my face and through my hair. I think how we could keep driving and get to the ocean, stand on the edge of the earth looking out over everything.

“I’m turning around at the next intersection,” says Alison. She does, and the golden sun is behind us.

“I’ll try Andrew again,” I say. I do, but he does not answer.

We pass the brown shack bar.

In a few weeks, at some party at our house, when I leave the crowded kitchen early to sit alone in the living room, Alison and Lisen will come and find me there. Lisen will take whatever record it is off the turntable and put on Stevie Wonder, and Alison will take my hands and pull me off the couch. We will dance around the room together, the three of us, our own party. When it starts to rain, sudden and rumbling outside the open door, we will run out into the yard and up the gravel drive and down the hill on the other side, to the creek. Lisen will climb right into the shallow, rushing water and lie down.

“Lisen!” I’ll shout, because the water will be surprisingly rough, but Lisen will laugh, grab onto the stones of the creek bed, and let her legs bob behind her. Alison and I will stand, soaked past help or caring in our clothes, laughing too, and the water will flow over Lisen’s face and her forehead as if it is baptizing her, new, into this world.

Today, in the car, we drive back into town and buy three bright pumpkins from cardboard bins in the parking lot outside the Harris Teeter. We take them home and dig our hands into their cold, clean-smelling guts, put the oven on, toast seeds, spend the evening in the kitchen, carving.

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