In the storm of Goodman’s life, he is always a minute from finding shelter, a tin roof, a striped awning, hell, even a tree. His life has always been a storm, all 63 years, but now with Hannah gone, he feels the bite of wind everywhere he looks.
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Francine Witte ~ Possibly a Self-Portrait
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Michelle Ross ~ People in Elevators
People in elevators are anxious. This is partly because people in elevators are going somewhere, and the elevators are not that somewhere. But it is also because people in elevators are often alone in these elevators with strangers. Alone with strangers
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Miriam Levine ~ Five Poems
Jim
When Jim plays the clarinet, his torso lengthens,
his fingers sure on the tone holes,
on the keys. His lips warm on the reed,he sways in a dance like the dance
I once saw on an Attic amphora,
the son of Aphrodite watering hismother’s garden, water
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Kerri Quinn ~ Church
So my big secret isn’t that I date the occasional sugar daddy or two or I go commando—all the time—the secret is I started to go to church. I go not because I’ve found religion, but because I have some girl crushes.
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Sean Scanlan ~ Clodhoppers: A Reminiscence
Enterprise, Alabama, 1978:
The salesman behind the glass counter handed my dad a handwritten receipt and a few dollars, then looked down at me. “Well kiddo,” he said, “in a couple of years you’ll fit into a grown-up
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James Tadd Adcox ~ Three Stories About Loss
Unable to Sleep
For several nights now he had believed himself unable to sleep. Each morning he would rise remembering having spent the previous eight hours staring at the ceiling. It was unbearable. And yet when he mentioned
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Gary Young ~ Three Poems
Last night, my brother’s heart stopped beating. My brother will be dead for the rest of my life. He will be dead forever. I shuffle up the drive, stop and kick the camellias that litter the road. I kneel to pick up the blossoms
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Glen Pourciau ~ Two Flash Fictions
Emanate
I’d had a good week. I’d gone about my business without running into anyone I knew. No one had spoken to me or stared at me. When I returned home from the grocery store or wherever, I pushed the button to lower
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Mary Grimm ~ Mother Does Not Go Gentle
Under the pressure of age and illness she lost her happiness, dragging herself from room to room, the house a prison now, hers and ours. One of us had to be there because she couldn’t do what she had always done. She couldn’t do so we had to but
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Summer 2025 — NWWQ
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Lee Upton ~ Four Poems
The Nap
For so long it wasn’t possible—
although at the credit agency
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Adam J. Galanski-De León ~ George Lassos The Moon
No one knew what to do the day the sunrise got stuck on the horizon. The orb of pink and gold and the purple shaded clouds just sort of slouched there, watching us.
The engineers
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Eva Marie Ginsburg ~ Shoes
When they finally let me out of the hospital, nobody could find my shoes. Shoes were the first thing they’d taken away in the emergency room, but
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Brian Rawlins ~ Tiny Organs
Things finally started to feel okay after I stole the car, paid twenty dollars for a Slurpee and vowed never to wear shoes again.
The luxury car was left running outside the
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Robert Kinerk ~ Five Poems
Yelling at the Baby
So, your baby is standing up in her crib
clinging to the railing with her chubby hands
and squalling for reasons you can’t figure out, -
Bruce Wagner ~ Marjorie
The old woman, ninety-five come July, had lived a life of fires.
She used to hear stories about the one in 1903 that ate the ranch nestled in the hills of the 13,000-acre Spanish Land Grant that her grandparents bought—Rancho Topanga Malibu Sequit.
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Matthew E. Henry ~ There Is No God-Damned Metaphor Here
I often destroy the printed drafts of my writing. In part, it’s paranoia—an unrealistic and egotistical worry that someone might steal my ideas. Or, far worse, someone might read them. It’s the fear of revelation without
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Lisa Thornton ~ Fancy Thompson
Three crosses on a hill made from rusty clothesline poles watched over the town. The middle one was taller than the two flanking it. “What’s a chigger?” she asked him once. He had smiled while she scratched her ankles.
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Michele Alouf ~ Lani
The baby girl is called Lani because her mother, Nell, feels the name escape from her mouth like a child’s laugh when she says it aloud. She first saw the name in the issue of Seventeen, which she hid behind in
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Kip Knott ~ Three Pieces
Morning Swim
Last night I watched the wind and tide carry my mother’s ashes out to sea. And now this morning it seems to me that her favorite coffee cup holds an ocean. I can’t help but feel God-like cradling its entirety in my hands, even though my mind tells