Category: Nonfiction

Essay: “Mohammed and Me” by Mandy Shunnarah

Our eyes met in the rearview mirror and he looked at me appraisingly. “You look Middle Eastern.” This would have been odd coming from anyone else, but my Lyft driver who’d just picked me up from a watch party for the 2018 midterm elections—with his keffiyeh scarf draped over the passenger seat headrest and his…
An Essay from the Future: “What the Birds See” by Janice Lee

—for and with AH Bird 1: How might we envision a future that is not ours, but could be?Bird 2: What you are asking about is the rejection of linear time, because linearity is for the colonizer, in which there is only one kind of progress.Bird 1: And what kinds of progress do we have?Bird…
“The Other Iras: A Multiverse Essay,” nonfiction from The Future by Ira Sukrungruang

Ira finds an anthill, and instead of burning it, he watches the slow, tedious work of carrying a crumb into the earth. In this way, he learns the true meaning of weight loss. Ira burns his steak and the pan that cooks the steak and the kitchen where he is cooking the steak. The fire…
Essay Hybrid: “Gnome: Excerpts” by Robert Lunday

Kouroi step forward and their smiles are votive candles. How much is lived between the words? What we need to see hides in the blind spots. The more we close our eyes, the more our faces open. Contours ripple to a point of disappearance. Whites of the eyes enhance gaze signals. Eyebrows exaggerate expression. A…
Nonfiction Essay: Philip James Shaw’s “when i’m having a difficult time maintaining my concentration with regard to certain aspects of my most immediate surroundings”

when i am away to work.I can work. I can even go away to work. I work as well as I can. Even though it changes, I am keeping up. A hotel room is a cleanser of sleep, of my life. Devoid of attachments, I splay myself out on the King, in less than boxer…
Three Essays from Brief Interviews with the Romantic Past: Kathryn Nuernberger

Introduction to the Symbols of the Revolution My husband is not interested in reading about Marie Antoinette’s hair. “Isn’t this a little girly for you?” he says. I show this man everything I write because he gives the best advice of anyone I know. He gives it in a way that is harsh, even when…
An Essay by Isabelle Davis: “Lay Off the High Ones”

They failed to come back to Earth1, gravity, conventional use of time. B says, That would be the best way to die. To become fire, immediately after seeing outside of a world everybody else you know will never see outside of, would be so simple. Everything would be colors. Eighteen people have died in…
Three Short Essays by Karen Craigo

Fat Race Marshal I’m just here for the donuts. That may be the fattest thing I’ve ever uttered, but it’s okay. You have to own your body when you’re at the 6:30 a.m. registration for a 15K race, and all around you, very fit people are engaged in walking lunges or the dynamic pigeon pose.…
Natalie Cunningham: “Earth Works,” an essay

The people of the Midwest were inveterate movers of the earth. Monks Mound towers above its landscape, with hundreds of smaller mounds tossed across the landscape like a child playing jacks on the table of the soil. They used seashells, stone hoes, baskets, a painstaking process of digging, loading, hauling, dumping, shaping. Someone estimates forty-three…