I wrote a song about a ghost who wanders around, not trying to scare people, just trying to find some information about how she became a ghost.
POEM OF THE WEEK
Mestra as Translator
By Martha Paz-Soldan
In a language I couldn’t understand he once told me about the night he spent in a jail cell. The birthdays he missed. The dogfights he won.
RECENT AWARDS
Recent Awards for Our Authors
Year in and out, many of our authors receive notable awards, including the BASS and O. Henry prize, and many others. You can find their works here.
CLASSICS
Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot
By Robert Olen Butler
All that I wished was to sit on her shoulder and fluff my feathers and lay my head against her cheek.
FALL CONTEST WINNER
NONFICTION
FALL CONTEST WINNER
The Spectacular
By Renée Thompson
Con held Glacier close to his chest and inhaled the scent of her feathers—a mix of mountain air and high-desert sage, of dust and bark and willow.
NONFICTION
The Measure of All Things?
By Hal Crowther
There are mornings, not few enough, when I feel like burning my birth certificate and resigning from the human race.
FICTION
FICTION
FICTION
Daddy’s Girl
By Cally Fiedorek
He’d always seemed to run in some pretty smarmy circles, Daddy. Everything incestuous, everybody knowing everybody. A Midtown shadow world.
FICTION
The Rooms
By Susan Minot
What she wanted, she found herself saying before the sob choked her, was to be able to live—not just with another person, but with herself.
NARRATIVE OUTLOUD
CARTOONS
NARRATIVE OUTLOUD
Rhythm & Sound
By Donald Hall
Every time you write free verse you are improvising your way toward a conclusion that will bind everything together.
CARTOONS
Cartoon Art Volume 2024-03
By Various Artists
New laughs with fresh recruits, an embarrassing tangle, desire’s stormy impact, and much more.
POETRY
POETRY
POETRY
POETRY
My Opera
By Kim Addonizio
The staging is difficult. Exploding stars are involved, high-redshift galaxies, interior chambers, a little country blues, a little jazz guitar.
POETRY
Cocaine & Flowers
By Brian Gyamfi
When the gods came to America with a bag of cocaine and flowers they were beheaded. Their death had nothing to do with the president.
POETRY
Old Friend
By Naomi Shihab Nye
Spring billowing, I navigate my daily pool of gloom. Arrange your five deflating basketballs under the lonely net. I always loved the honesty of old friends.
POETRY
POETRY
POETRY
POETRY
At the Museum of Empress Livia’s Garden Room
By Pimone Triplett
The nouns pile up. Umbrella pine, oleander, quince. Or go missing as anything else.
POETRY
The Loneliness of Fireworks
By Zhai Yongming
Fireworks and bar girls all dance in revelry before they subside, in the end, into loneliness. Anyone can go wild in this moonlight.
POETRY
Home Is a Verb of Motion
By Grace H. Zhou
On a bald knoll, circled by on-ramps and overpasses, weathering and weighted is a concrete behemoth for the gods of want.