ISSUES | winter 2020
43.4 (Winter 2020): “True Confessions”
Inside: first fiction from Isabelle Shifrin. Featuring poetry by John Gallaher, Jennifer Sperry Steinorth, and Teresa Ott, fiction by Drew Calvert, Yxta Maya Murray, Mehr-Afarin Kohan, and Sam Dunnington, essays from Molly Wright Steenson and Phillip Hurst, and more, including a Curio Cabinet piece on Hans Christian Andersen.
CONTENT FROM THIS ISSUE
Features
Mar 02 2021
Foreword: True Confessions
In 2007, during the events surrounding the funeral of my mother, Betty Speer Morgan, who was one of my heroes, my brother and I shared childhood stories, including one that… read more
Fiction
Mar 02 2021
The World As It Is
I am someone who tries to live his life diplomatically. It’s a style I first adopted on the playgrounds and schoolyards of Ammendale, Maryland, and over the years I guess… read more
Fiction
Mar 02 2021
The Hunter
The nurse and I had our faces covered by woolen scarves, gloved hands in our pockets, as we walked up the hill towards the RCMP station. I’d learned the hard… read more
Fiction
Mar 02 2021
Motherland
June of that year was particularly hot, even for the high desert of southern Idaho. The sun glared down fiercely, and the cheatgrass on the hills below the basalt rimrocks… read more
Fiction
Mar 02 2021
Mookie and Me
The bleachers at this little alternative college are full of kids who are not Mookie’s typical demographic: hair dye, no shoes, many piercings, diverse, androgynous, every type of kid you… read more
Fiction
Mar 02 2021
Happiness is a Moth
“Less than 30 miles from Malibu, the nearly 3,000-acre site had been used since the late ’40s for the development of rocket engines. In the ’50s, Atomics International began to… read more
Poetry
Mar 02 2021
Poems: Teresa Ott
Trembling Was All Living, Living Was All Loving, Some One Was Then the Other One In the amniotic gloss of the past, feathers floated to the surface, then flew away.… read more
Poetry
Mar 02 2021
Poems: John Gallaher
Division (Architecture 5) Let’s watch the process one more time. During the first stage of mitosis, prophase, we see the classic chromosome structure. Notice the DNA condensing. Outside, my neighbor… read more
Nonfiction
Mar 02 2021
A Series of Tubes
Although widely ridiculed for the statement, the late Alaska Senator Ted Stevens was right when he said, “The Internet is a series of tubes.” He was just off by a… read more
Curio Cabinet
Mar 01 2021
Hans Christian Andersen: Cutting Out Fairy Tales
Hans Christian Andersen: Cutting Out Fairy Tales In Andersen’s paper-cuts you see His poetry! A medley of diverting treasures All done with scissors. —Hans Christen Andersen, from a scrapbook made… read more
Nonfiction
Mar 01 2021
Terroir
One night while counting down the till at Casa de Agave, the San Diego tequila bar I’d been working for a couple of fun but exhausting years, I received an… read more
Features
Mar 01 2021
Review: Collected in 2020–Recent Essay and Story Collections of Note
Collected in 2020—Recent Essay and Story Collections of Note Sam Pickering Scott Russell Sanders, The Way of Imagination: Essays. Counterpoint, 2020, 259 pp., $16.95. Paperback. Megan Harlan, Mobile Home: A… read more