Category: Creative Nonfiction

Flavor Town USA Nonfiction: “Little Bird Tongues” by Richie Zaborowske

The preparation of the ortolan bunting songbird is steeped in booze, gruesome tradition, and taboo. The tiny birds are captured alive and forced into blackout cages filled with grain. Similar to a clandestine midnight kitchen gorging, the lack of light disorients the birds and they feed until they nearly double in size. The overstuffed birds…
Original Side A Essay: “On the Boulder” by David Capps

On the Boulder Begin with the proposition that the boulder is not a mountain. That you are not so relatively small. The proposition that the boulder is not a mountain locates itself in space where the body is: arms reaching, fingers outstretched, toes secured in familiar footholds; familiarity through the matter of scale. The proposition…
Miriam Gershow: “Nature Stories,” a new nonfiction for Bad Survivalist

1. The GPS gets us lost on the way to the boat launch. We backtrack and I take out Google Maps on my phone. We argue, but familiarly. My husband says he’ll know it by sight. I tell him when he’s on the wrong road, but get left mixed up with right. Turn here, I…
The Future by (∀/non i/U): “UX-000-111 (Oxygen),” from a larger work in progress called U/X

“UX-000-111″ is from a larger work in progress called U/X, about the author’s (∀/non i/U) User eXperience w/ the fundamental elements + how we forever live in the interface of the senses, under the spell of the “man-maid” objects we think we make when in fact they make us make them. *Ed.’s Note: click images to…
Side A Hybrid: “shroud trick” by Amelia K

Step 1. Start with a square sheet of paper with the white side facing up. Fold the paper in half horizontally. Crease it well and then unfold it.[1] Step 2. Fold the paper in half vertically. Crease it well and then unfold it.[2] Step 3. Fold the corner of the paper to the center. You’ll do this on…
Essay: “The Box” by Diana Whitney

The box was waiting on my porch when I came home from acupuncture. Cardboard, square, criss-crossed with blue tape, big enough to fit a toaster or a cat. A stranger had sent me a package in the mail. I do not know this man, although he’d written my name and address in sharpie and his…
“The Weight,” a flash nonfiction for Side A by Aleina Grace Edwards

The Weight Eleven Look at you, cutie, you’re all skin and bones! Maya’s mom beams at me and scoops homemade mac and cheese onto my plate. I’m wearing her daughter’s T-shirt and a pair of cotton shorts; both are too big for me. I smile back, encouraged. My arms, always too long for my body, move…
“Distance and Memory,” a Side A Essay by Jason Zuzga

My grandmom Victoria (Tomaro) Stracquadanio born in Boiano, Italy, immigrant to Bound Brook, New Jersey, subsequently married John of Modica, Sicily. At the age of 21, I visited both towns. She, widowed, is suffering, at 99-years old, from vascular dementia at a nursing home near my mom’s home. My grandmom is now under the protocols…
“Cordyceps,” a flash essay by Sher Ting

Did you know cordyceps colonizes the bodies of carpenter ants, chemically hypnotizing them to ascend to the highest point in the environment before releasing a mushroom cloud of spores? I have been told a hundred useless facts, with bread and a butter knife on the train to Oslo. The man next to me, knotted in…