.… MEDCAT. The Bar. Driver’s license knowledge test. Jeez! It’s like prepping for an exam. But can you prep for death with twenty parlor game questions? … Twenty Questions. You remember— oh, of course not. Well before your time.
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Vincent Barry ~ That “Nimrod”
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Myna Chang ~ Daily Special
Not much to see in Tascadora, Texas. Rough strip of road, two liquor stores, three churches. The Happy Harvest Grocery, its parking lot smooth as buttercream.
Tessa holes-up in her minivan next to the cart return cage. Red velvet is the cake of the
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Kim Magowan ~ The Physics of Motion
I. Friction
When they kick her and Ethan and baby Rose out of the hospital, Iris thinks how could they be so irresponsible? She has no idea how to care for a baby. Look at the fucked up way Ethan installed the car seat. First home, Rose vomits breast
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Kurt Olsson ~ Five Poems
Mats
Sonny and I are looking for floor mats for his car. Store after store, hundreds upon hundreds of mats. No luck. Finally, I take out a knife, tell him I’ll cut myself in two and Sonny can use me as a floor mat. We’ll star
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Steve Chang ~The Plague Book of Prayers
Antibody
Where did this helicopter think it was headed? To a protest. Wildfire. High-speed pursuit. This is New Los Angeles. I almost wrote wildlife for wildfire. That’s where I’m headed, I think, soon.
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Josh Russell ~ Four Essays
For Dexys Midnight Runners
One day after school, on a sidewalk in Northern Kentucky, three hicks beat me up. Earlier, in the lunchroom, a cheerleader named Dawn asked me to smell a jar of Noxzema. When I bent to sniff, she
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Craig Kirchner ~ Four Poems
Summer Rehearsal
People took to us but whispered. We talked to everyone. No anxiety. Free. Clowns in a medieval play, reaching like new blooms in beat summer sun. We feigned opera in leather jackets, drank cranberry cordial from plastic cups. Cross-dressed at happy
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NWWQ ~ APRIL 2023
Thanks to all who submitted. NWWQ will accept submissions again July 1–14, 2023. Special thanks to our Senior editors Elizabeth Wagner and Kim Chinquee for selecting much of the work published in this quarterly issue.
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M. Bela Sas ~ The Verb of Living Things
The red-haired Polish teacher, Kasia, stood up at the front of the room in chic white pants with the white chalk in her hands. Today we would talk about food, she said. Pomodory: tomatoes; ziemniaki: potatoes.
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Kip Knott ~ Family Reunion
I knew my father would come for me eventually. But I’m determined not to let the nick-nick of lock picks shake me off the mid-century modern settee I bought on my own rather than accept his bequeathed oversized sofa. I set my jaw tight.
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Kathleen Flenniken ~ Five Poems
Five-Paragraph Essay on Time
More than once, but only a few times,
I set an alarm for 5 a.m.
and blew off my high school essays
to watch TV. It rang
and I left my warm bed to shiver
at the desk in the living room window.Nervous about finishing, no chance to revise,
I double-spaced -
James Kangas ~ Four Stories
Pictures
Too blustery and wet to go out, I sit down with a box of old photos. Here’s one of Aunt Esther in a spiffy hat with my brother Bob in 1940 or ’41 on the stoop of a house in Detroit where he was born, a couple of years before she gave birth to her
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Anna Mantzaris ~ Application To Be the Brightest Star In the Universe
What is your form? Solid? Liquid? Gas?
Are you afraid of heights?
Have you ever left the atmosphere?
Can you keep yourself occupied in thought?
Are you able to take on a lifespan of a few hundred million years?
Do you want to explode
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Rick Rohdenburg ~ Six Poems
In Those Days
Weeks had only one Friday. Life was simpler as there was less to anticipate. The grass was no greener but had beautiful tints of deep blue. It did not snow often but when it did some were awed by its silence. The shadows of the day were the ordinary
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Ann Weil ~ Five Poems
Blood of the Banana
For Troy, Brian, Alexandria, Arielle, Guadalupe, John, Nate and X
The flower pod hung
low and heavy,
a gorgeous appendage
dangling
two feet below
the bunch.If left to nature,
it would ooze
its latex, clear at first,
then crimson -
David Gilbert ~ The Rapture on Five Dollars a Day
The lawn chairs rose in the air as if the Rapture was leaving the righteous behind. When the townsfolk saw their pastor in a chair, they wondered why they were standing in their backyards. They shouted for an explanation but
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Kathleen McGookey ~ In My Hometown Library
I sat with a poet I loved like a father, reading poems. They were my poems, and I wanted to know what to do. Let me say this kind of dream has never come to me before. I passed manuscript pages to the poet I loved like a father, and he passed them
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Marc Tweed ~ When Someone You Love Leaves Very Early in the Morning
On a very sad night—sad because Donna leaves early the next morning and that is exactly the kind of thing I’ve become less and less able to bear with any grace—I sit hunched forward in the recliner in the guest room
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Jeffrey Thompson ~ Five Poems
Lonesome George
Maybe you won every battle
but the last. Maybe you didn’t
fight at all. In the end
you found a warm spot by the window
where you could nurse your coffee
the whole working day.Killing Time
1.
When the bad thoughts come,
My shrink tells me, -
Bryan D. Price ~ The History of Sound
Last night I had a dream that I was dying or about to die. Some organs had been removed from my body. They looked like little wooden knobs. They were said to be lungs. Excuse the passive voice, but dreams are ruled by the