11Mar 23, 2024
I press play on the DVD remote, sit back in my favorite corner of the couch, and watch silent images from home movies. My dad sports a crew cut and clenches a pipe between his teeth as he assembles a small wooden trike on the back porch of our suburban Cincinnati house. Behind his back, […]
12Mar 23, 2024
after The Vaselines Jesus was everywhere, Sister Marita Ann Explained to the classroom of straight-backed Second graders lined up like rosary beads, hands Underneath our boxy seats, folded on plaid laps as She revealed the secrets of Catholicism and the Wooden figure my eyes tried to avoid catching Above the altar each week, his too-naked […]
13Aug 9, 2023
In the house of my past I saw them paired on the porch I have wanted all this time, a place to sit and rock, eyes on weather crossing the sky like sheep. I have wanted to sit, in the film’s last scene, by the shepherd, to be the woman he wanted, eyes over the […]
14Aug 9, 2023
“I remembered something. You told me to open myself up to memories about my mother, and I do remember something,” I murmur, a little bashful. “Tell me about it,” my new therapist says. She’s not just my new therapist. She’s my first therapist. If my MetroCard doesn’t make me a New Yorker, then this surely […]
15Aug 9, 2023
Detective Kate Reid sat outside the house, eyeing it from her cruiser. The engine of the vehicle was clicking as it cooled, then fell into silence after a few minutes. As she looked over the writing in her notebook, she knew there was nothing there she hadn’t already memorized before leaving the precinct, yet she […]
16Aug 9, 2023
How quickly she cleaned her knife, your blood now on the cleaning cloth. How quickly she prided herself in forgiving you for overreacting. What a good friend. “Liar,” she said, then “drama,” and now it’s “water under a bridge” apparently. She doesn’t want to talk about it anymore, but she forced you to drink that […]
17Aug 9, 2023
Chickens once dotted the yard, overrunning the lawn like soft white dandelion seed heads. Intolerable mean girls, the hens reared aggressive when the one I named Olive wanted her share of patio shade or watermelon seeds. Olive suffered in silence, separate when the others fought over worms, but she’d edge close hopeful for scraps. It […]
18Aug 9, 2023
I dug, I broke ground, through clay littered with rocks upon rocks. The metallic ring of the shovel hitting stone rung up my arms with the same aching vibration of a taut violin string plucked. From my fingertips the smallest seeds scattered and tamped. Morning and night, weighted down with water jugs that smacked against […]
19Aug 9, 2023
I imagined my striptease from silk a color-blue clarity; limbs loudly posed, wing spanned; songbird story that goes with the tattoo ink engraved beneath shoulder. The limit does not exist. Walking away from my chrysalis, I felt unmoving. Listless life an art gallery of black-and-white memory I begged myself to burn ocean swept. I begged […]
20Aug 9, 2023
Jim Ross jumped into creative pursuits in 2015 after a rewarding career in public health research. With graduate degree from Howard University, in seven years he’s published nonfiction, fiction, poetry, photography, hybrid, interviews, and plays in nearly 200 journals on five continents. Photo publications include Barnstorm, Bombay Gin, Blood Orange, Burningword, Camas, Columbia Journal, […]