Like a salty sailor, my son cusses his way out of bed and into the morning. Stubbed toe and no hot water, Mother Teresa. Burnt bagel, Mother Teresa. What a devious bride of Christ, orchestrating my son’s failures from the other side. She who blessed Calcutta lepers makes him run a stop sign bang in…
Seven, maybe eight years old, nude, and out Of nowhere there she was Streaked from the waist down in glistening Pebbled green shit, shivering as she ate a tube of cherry lip Gloss In the Great Ape House at the Lincoln Park Zoo. My wife was the first to see her— Her hand flying to…
I. “Who is Susan Glaspell?” That was the question The New York Times asked in half-inch type in May 1918. At the time, Susan Glaspell’s star was ascendant. Her name was already well known in the New York theater world for the one-act plays she had written for the Provincetown Players, the little theater she…
In my parents’ day, they called lovers flames, and I’d try to imagine this literally. I remember a girl asking if I wanted to make love, which I thought then meant sweet talk: You are breathtaking. My first loves were older; they took the top, their hair fell and swept my face. I felt their…
It’s the last day of teaching in prison and time for my promise: They could read me. Lay my life on that wobbling table. Ignore for a moment the torn covers of their reject anthologies. Ignore for a moment the camera watching, the speaker telling them where they need to be: to Buddhist call-out, to…
She sank and died—the girl from out of town that summer. They pulled her body like waterweed, then winter came, enclosed the lake in glass, and sealed the dark cavern of our questions. We skated on the frozen shell. All around, the mountains glittered chained in ice. The lake was pale blue and cracked with…
I was rolling jeans into tubular bundles and tucking them into my suitcase, packing for Prague. This trip would be the longest that I’d been away from the kids, and also the farthest. “Don’t worry about us,” my husband said. “OK,” I said. “We’ll be fine,” he continued, sensing my anxiety. He handed me an…
In nonfiction, our winner is Mimi Dixon for her essay “Breath.” The nonfiction judge, Dinty W. Moore, writes that “Breath” is “an exquisite memoir essay filled with gorgeous detail, breath, music, wisdom, and surprise. Though I never met the author’s father, by the end of this graceful, intimate essay I, too, miss his presence in…
In poetry, our winner is Leila Chatti for her poem “Confession.” The poetry judge, Marianne Boruch, writes of “Confession,” “It’s the first I’ve heard of anyone having an honest-to-god point-of-view about Mary whom many of us grew up numbly staring at on a holy card, buying her pious gratitude whole-cloth, and mouthing each repeated prayer…
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