Nonfiction
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An interview with Robert Polito and an excerpt from “After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan’s Memory Palace”
by Charlotte Slivka
Robert Polito’s After the Flood: inside Bob Dylan’s Memory Palace is encyclopedic in scope with a poet’s narration. It breaks down Bob Dylan’s career during the years 1991 – 2024 and conjures the shape of his resurgence from the underworld after receiving the Grammy’s Lifetime Achievement Award; an award intended to honor him and bury him under a monument to his past simultaneously. What should have happened next in the wake of acceptance was the convenient hush of a great musician who had had a good run, then relegated to the pasture of cultural history,
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Thrust Fault
art by Richard Hanus
by Sharon K. McClain
The front-door frame is supposed to be the strongest in the house, so you squeeze into that rectangle while your siblings spill onto the front porch, vertiginous from tumulted terrain. It’s years before the public safety chant of “Drop, Cover, and Hold On.” Forty-seven miles away, tectonic compression detonates, aggravating a previously unknown fault, forcing mountains six feet upward, buckling roads and freeways. Disfiguring the landscape.
Your stepfather, Bob, roars that this is “The Big One.” Vindication wild in his navy blue eyes.
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Raft
art by Cynthia Yachtman
by Terry Engel
My wife Shelley texts: “I’m going to a vigil for New Year’s Eve. It’s mostly singing readings quiet reflection peaceful. You’d really enjoy it.”
I’m paddling a kayak on the Forked Deer River a few miles away. The people in this part of Arkansas pronounce “Forked” with two syllables. The watershed drains a hundred square miles, most of it wetland, more lake than river, more swamp than lake. On the map the Forked Deer looks like the lateral veins of a leaf extending from the edges to the central vein,
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I Double Dare You
art by JJ Cromer
by Laura Shaine Cunningham
I invested my 8-year-old friend, the wild child of our slum neighborhood, with the power to save me…and perhaps she did
I assumed she had died long ago or, as the awful expression goes, was “as good as dead.” The last time I saw Diana, she was eight years old, sitting on the stoop of her apartment building on the mean streets of the South Bronx. She was smoking and dealing cards to a group of older boys.
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The One I’ve Been Dying To Tell
art by Robert Thurman
by Polly Hansen
Two years ago, I sat on the edge of my mother’s bed and patted her knee, thinking it was my last good-bye. She was ninety-five. I was sixty-seven. We lived over two-thousand miles apart–she in Spokane, Washington, with my older sister, her caretaker, and me in Asheville, North Carolina, with my husband.
“This may be the last time I’ll ever see you,” I said, thinking she might die before I got out there to see her again. She could go any minute.
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Art Therapy
art by Mary Petrokubi
by Marilyn Petrokubi
Mary still rested in her bed near death. Her snow-white hair lay limp on the pillow. The year was 1950, and she was thirty-eight years old. Mary was dying from pernicious anemia, and to make matters worse, she was pregnant.
In the kitchen of their modest home, her husband Stephen, a science teacher, was preparing shank bone meat with vegetables in the pressure cooker. In those days it wasn’t called osso buco, it was just meat and marrow. But it was exactly what the doctor ordered for Mary in conjunction with an experimental vitamin B12 therapy,
