Justin Carter
Autumn Returns to Martins Ferry, Ohio

Justin Carter - Autumn Returns to Martins Ferry, Ohio

Poetry
Justin Carter is a PhD candidate at the University of North Texas. His work appears in The Collagist, cream city review, The Journal, Sonora Review, and Sycamore Review. Read more »
Brett Riley
Closed for Storm

Brett Riley - Closed for Storm

Fiction
Brett Riley is the author of The Subtle Dance of Impulse and Light (Ink Brush Press) and the screenplay Candy’s First Kiss, which won or placed in five contests. His stories have appeared in… Read more »
Susan Rich
Coordinates

Susan Rich - Coordinates

Poetry
Susan Rich is an award-winning poet, editor, and teacher living in the Pacific Northwest. She's the author of four poetry collections including, most recently, Cloud Pharmacy, and The Alchemist's… Read more »
Roy White
Correspondences

Roy White - Correspondences

Poetry
Roy White is a blind person who lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota with a lovely woman and a handsome lab mix. His work has appeared, or is about to, in BOAAT Journal, American Journal of Poetry,… Read more »
Brendan Walsh
Dropping Weight

Brendan Walsh - Dropping Weight

Contest - 3rd Place
Brendan Walsh has lived and taught in South Korea, Laos, and South Florida. His work appears in Glass Poetry, Indianapolis Review, Wisconsin Review, Mudfish, Lines + Stars, and other journals. He is… Read more »
Brian Czyzyk
Eating Emily Dickinson’s Clothes

Brian Czyzyk - Eating Emily Dickinson’s Clothes

Poetry
Brian Czyzyk lives and writes in Northern Michigan. He was awarded the 2017 Dan Veach Prize for Younger Poets from Atlanta Review, and has work published in or forthcoming from CutBank, Gulf Stream… Read more »
Pamela Schmid
Emergence

Pamela Schmid - Emergence

Creative Nonfiction
Pamela Schmid lives in St. Paul, Minn., and is the creative nonfiction editor at Sleet, an online magazine. She was the recipient of a 2013-14 Loft Mentor Series award in nonfiction and the runner-up… Read more »
William Woolfitt
Fruit Jar

William Woolfitt - Fruit Jar

Fiction
William Woolfitt is the author of three poetry collections: Beauty Strip (Texas Review Press, 2014), Charles of the Desert (Paraclete Press, 2016), and Spring Up Everlasting (Paraclete Press,… Read more »
Calvin Olsen
Hammer Strikes

Calvin Olsen - Hammer Strikes

Poetry
Calvin Olsen holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Boston University, where he received a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship for translation from Portuguese. His poetry and translations have appeared in… Read more »
Allie Marini
Kitchen Kisses

Allie Marini - Kitchen Kisses

Contest - 2nd Place
Allie Marini is a cross-genre writer holding degrees from both Antioch University of Los Angeles & New College of Florida. She has been a finalist for Best of the Net and nominated for the… Read more »
Cecily Berberat
Lemon drop

Cecily Berberat - Lemon drop

Contest - 1st Place
Cecily Berberat holds an MFA in Fiction and an MA in English literature from the University of Montana, Missoula. She is the recipient of the 2012 Montana Meadowlark Award, judged by Richard Ford, and… Read more »
Cady Vishniac
M

Cady Vishniac - M

Fiction
Cady Vishniac is a Big Ten Academic Alliance Traveling Scholar at the University of Michigan and a Translation Fellow at the Yiddish Book Center. Her work has appeared most recently in Glimmer Train… Read more »
Sarah Toomey
Orzech Farms

Sarah Toomey - Orzech Farms

Poetry
Sarah Toomey is a junior at Harvard College pursuing a BA in English. Her work has been featured in Off the Coast Magazine, The Harvard Advocate, and other local and college-founded literary… Read more »
Lupita Eyde-Tucker
Rules of Engagement

Lupita Eyde-Tucker - Rules of Engagement

Poetry
Lupita Eyde-Tucker was raised in New Jersey and Guayaquil, Ecuador. She writes poetry in English and Spanish, and has studied poetry at Bread Loaf, the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, and is a Fellow at… Read more »
Afolabi Opanubi
Rust

Afolabi Opanubi - Rust

Fiction
Afolabi Opanubi grew up in Port Harcourt, a city in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. He lived there up until he was sixteen, after which, he left for Canada to study and work. Currently, he lives in… Read more »
Joe Kraus
Sears and Roebuck

Joe Kraus - Sears and Roebuck

Fiction
Joe Kraus is a professor of English at the University of Scranton where he teaches creative writing and American literature. He’s the co-author of An Accidental Anarchist (Academy Chicago 2001),… Read more »
Maryann Corbett
State Office Building, Seventh Floor

Maryann Corbett - State Office Building, Seventh Floor

Poetry
Maryann Corbett spent almost thirty-five years working for the Office of the Revisor of Statutes at the Minnesota Legislature. Her work has appeared widely in journals like 32 Poems, Barrow Street,… Read more »
Lauren Westerfield
The Need to Use Your Teeth

Lauren Westerfield - The Need to Use Your Teeth

Creative Nonfiction
Lauren W. Westerfield is an essayist, poet, and editor from the Northern California coast. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Sonora Review, [PANK], Hobart, Phoebe, Permafrost, Noble/Gas… Read more »

Fruit Jar

William Woolfitt

I leaned close, braved the flail of Mama’s brown-furred tongue. I could almost untangle what words she sputtered. Look in the woods, Suse, she might have said. On the Jamison place, around the old pond. Bee balm, boneset. Oswego tea. I remembered her telling Lilian and Ethel and me that she had learned the heal-alls from her grandmother, that when we were older, she meant to teach us what common leaves and lowly stems and potent roots we should keep in our larders. There was so much she had not told. In Mama’s fragments of speech, I wanted to hear that I was the one she had chosen, that she meant to pass her store of knowledge to me.

I wiped Mama with wet cloths cooled in the springhouse; poured for her all the water she could drink; steeped pennyroyal leaves from the ravine, made a brew, hoped that it would help her sweat and heave. I kept her windows open day and night, and I cut off her chestnut hair, coiled it in a wreath. When the doctor finally came, he put steamed flannel on her heart, hot tins on her feet. I saw Mama struggle and twitch, gasping for breath like a landed fish who should be cut from its nets, and let go.

~

Mama kept her knobby fingers under the sheet, hiding how they writhed like creatures she couldn’t tame. I listened for her fought-for breaths, for a memory of what she and I were like when I was her only-born and my siblings were futures away. I listened for story-scraps that I might take in like a food, so to carry in my body some trace of her. I didn’t get much. A little bit about how she met my father at a pie supper. How my sister Ethel, two years younger than me, was born with one eye that did not open. And how two years after that, Lilian was underweight at birth, so tiny she could fit inside my father’s cupped hands. How my brothers born after Lilian had colicky spells, colds, and measles.

Sometimes I snapped at Mama when she offered me these stories, the same stories as always, nothing new that I might savor. I told her to conserve her strength, get some sleep. I could fill in where she left off: Ethel’s eye was just a pucker of flesh until Brother Marsh blew on it and spoke in tongues. And now Ethel was prettiest, Mama had taught her to sew, her dresses always had some trick with ribbon, some unexpected garnish, and all the boys at church looked at her, only at her. And Lilian was just as dainty and fine and musical as a chickadee. And my brothers had rallied from their ailments, after Mama sang to them and dosed them with onion juice and sassafras to bust colds and build the blood. Mama did not lose any of us. I was always her helper; at her bidding, I pushed a baked onion through a sieve, and pinched the beetles that gnawed her flowers, and when there was a tree she couldn’t climb, I wrapped myself around the trunk, hauled myself up, and went into the high branches to bring her a cluster of waxy red berries.

~

There was nothing like speech after she gasped, only a shallow breath, and then an awful silence. And then another weak breath. Mama’s face was hot and gray, a drift of ash. Maybe that was my inheritance, the little that was mine.

~

In the summer before she got sick, Mama had wanted to go mushroom hunting on High Germany. She asked me to accompany her, told Ethel to watch the boys while we were gone. I was so pleased. Mama and I took for a path the earth-scars where the logs had been skidded down Blue Knob. We passed through a field of waste, picked our way around the blast-holes where the felled poplars, too massive to move, had been shot with dynamite, then dragged to the skidways. We knelt on the banks of a sawdust-choked stream and lapped its cloudy waters.

The fever struck Mama, spared me. Perhaps I was spared for this work, for declining bodies, and for dead. Mama’s last bath turns easeful when I whisper fruit jar, bobbin, locust-husk—the part I tidy after the spilling out, the slow unwinding, the flying away.

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