October 2026 | nonfiction
Nuns & Spoons
We hold our cards in front of our mouths to hide the smiles. Draw, check your hand, discard. Keep an eye on the line of spoons. Tonight I’m the only kid still awake, surrounded by my mom, aunties, grandma, and my great-aunt, who is a Catholic nun. I sit tall among the women seated around the dessert table as we pass cards and scrutinize each other for any motions.
Then an auntie pulls a winning hand, and the stealth begins. She reaches out and slowly slides a spoon into her lap. Waits for others to notice. I see it happening, manage to grab another spoon. Others follow. My mom and the nun are the last to notice. And only one spoon left.
They reach at the same time, hands locking on either end of the spoon. “I got it! “No, I’ve got it!” They collapse into giggles but their grips stay strong. I’m entranced, watching. I can’t believe the women are acting like this. My mom, wrestling over a spoon with Sister Sharon Anne.
They are out of their chairs now, standing, gripping the spoon. “You’re a nun!” my mom exclaims as she tries to twist the spoon away and instead falls to the ground. “What about generosity of spirit? Turning the other cheek?” My great-aunt follows her to the floor. “Not….during….Spoons!” she responds, and with a final twist, wrenches the spoon free.
How to stay calm on the plane
When the message comes to you, pinging your phone as you watch Dune on the seatback screen thousands of miles up in the air, your mind a galaxy away as your body flies through space. It surprises you – who knew you could get texts up here, somewhere above the Atlantic. The zeros and ones convert to a most unwelcome message that detonates in your aisle seat: your neighbor, wondering about the ambulance at your house, wondering if everything is okay.
There’s a ringing in your ears you hadn’t noticed before. You can’t reach your husband at work. You can’t reach your mom, who is caring for the children. So you watch Dune. And breathe deep. You are terror-still in your seat. On screen they move across the sand in skips and slides to mimic the wind, to hide that they are humans, to fool the sand monsters underneath that would rage up and swallow them whole simply for being human, for carving out a little space for themselves on this earth.
You watch Dune. You breathe deep. You perch-cling onto the edge of your inner optimist, the one who says that your identity is probably still intact. The flight attendant comes down the aisle. Would you like peanuts or cookies? Are you now a wife or a widow? A mother or…the unspeakable? You recall that Dune was a favorite of your grandfather’s, who, when he saw it in the theater, was able to recite line for line from memory. Who, in late summer last year, passed away with library books still checked out. So don’t sweat the small stuff, you suppose. But also, people die.
You watch Dune. You breathe deep. You want to be on the other side of this, to stand in your too-white kitchen and trade stories about your week away. You don’t want to know. You must know. Outside, your spaceship speeds through the sky, but inside you barely dare to move.
Sarah Barbo
Sarah Barbo writes about family, identity, and sense of place. Her work has been published in Hippocampus, River Teeth’s Beautiful Things, In a Flash, and The Ekphrastic Review, and nominated for Best Small Fictions. Find her in the Colorado mountains and at www.sarahbarbo.com.
October 2026 | nonfiction
I’ll Be Prom Queen
Someday I’ll be outspoken, ballsy, articulate, funny. Totally cool, like Fran Lebowitz, but without the cufflinks. Also, I’ll be slow talking, soft talking. I’ll think before I speak. A person others feel okay around, feel good around, want to be with for my earth-mothery energy, healing vibes. Not buzzing, jagged, all jumpy inside. I’ll be serene.
I’ll swim with sea turtles in the Galapagos Islands, hug strangers in Sedona, Arizona, bike the California Coastal Trail and hike the Appalachian from Georgia to Maine. I’ll go skydiving. I’ll be prom queen and valedictorian. I’ll get accepted to all the Ivies, but I’ll choose Reed or Evergreen, St. John’s or Bard. I’ll go barefoot to class in spring.
I’ll throw together a chocolate soufflé at two a.m. that my lover and I will eat with our hands, lick chocolate off burning fingertips, drink chilled Cristal in tulip glasses from World Market. A dreadful pairing the champagne connoisseurs would say but we won’t know.
Someday my house will be pristine. No stuff piled all over the place. A vase of fresh-cut flowers, wistful timeless elegant flowers, baby’s breath, lavender, sweet peas, freesia, will sit on my teak nightstand. Next to it I’ll place tiny rocks I’ve rescued from the side of the road over the years, slipped into a pocket or warmed in the palm of my hand, into their own blown glass bowl. You belong here, I’ll tell them. Settle in. It’s our time to shine.
Judith Shapiro
Judith Shapiro is a Washington, DC–area writer who spends a lot of time in Hoboken, NJ, staring at the New York skyline. When the novel she’s writing looks the other way, she secretly delights in flash prose and poetry. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, her work appears in The Citron Review, The New York Times, Bending Genres, The Sun, and elsewhere.
October 2026 | nonfiction
Wonder Forgives
The nice thing about not knowing what you planted is that you never know what you’re going to get. In the moment I order bulbs or seeds (I’ve given up on vegetables), I am certain I will remember where they go. But every year I plant pollinator flowers, as well as any other perennials the deer won’t eat; I am surprised when they bloom. I don’t remember planting bee balm— look at the gorgeous reds! Or I planted something long ago and gave up on it growing. This year, the lupines I put in the ground years ago came bursting up all over the yard with their purple spikes and long parasol leaves. Surprise! Living, rather than just surviving, is rooted in the capacity for wonder.
But the surprise that comes with death leaves wonder behind. Death always shocks us. Our brains are wired for denial. My late husband never said anything about dying, even through four separate cancers and countless treatments. He would be one of the slim percentages that live after going into hospice. I was devastated when I woke up one morning to find him gone from his body. Why the surprise? Perhaps our logical brains get beaten down by our emotions. It was years before I saw beauty again without feeling guilty that he wasn’t there to share it.
They say that planting a garden is a belief in beauty, in hope. I didn’t think so when I was a newly grieving widow. I saw gardening as a way to dig out my frustration. Few things are as satisfying as pulling a weed out by the roots. I saw it as a way to mow down my feelings, or clip out the anger. In the thirteen years since his death, I have found that wonder is also a part of grief.
The hummingbirds chitter each other away from the feeders and the butterflies open their wings to the sun. I believe in nature’s magnificence. I feel wonder coming back to me. She forgives my denial. She allows me awe.
Lisa Christina St John
Lisa St. John is a writer living in the Hudson Valley of upstate New York. She is the author of two poetry books, Ponderings (Finishing Line Press) and Swallowing Stones (Kelsay Books). She won first place in Anthology’s 2024 Poetry Award for “Through the Membrane” and is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee for “War is a Human Child.” Her poetry has appeared in The Poet’s Billow, Light, Entropy, New Verse News, SWWIM, and The Ekphrastic Review, and “Mowing the Lawn” was shortlisted for the Fish Poetry Prize. Her travel writing appears on GoNomad.com, and her essays in Grief Digest Magazine and Sleet Magazine. She is currently working on a memoir when the poems allow it. Lisa believes that art is hope and that there is beauty in possibility. Find more on her website, lisachristinastjohn.com.
April 2026 | nonfiction
The Valley
The roads were full of craters, little divots grown wide by snow melt and balding tires clunk-clunk-clunking. There was a gravity to the town felt in even the smallest of valleys. This gravity kept feet planted behind the counter of one of the many Pizza Bellas. Even when teachers used the word “brainiac”, even when there were AP classes on the books and a brain that could remember, down to the millisecond, when someone important was assassinated.
Large pie special with two XL liters of Pepsi, $19.99, 45 minutes to an hour,
delivery or pickup, wings by the half-pound or pound.
A slew of Kennedy’s had come and gone, but this became the language of being, the real memorization in milligrams (Percocet), slices, minutes, pounds.
Some went to college. Counselors had pamphlets and muffins for a few quarters. It was a relief if they didn’t OD or drop out. There were a few moments when gravity would unclasp the youngest and brightest, long enough for them to go to one of the two colleges down the street for something like business or education. They absorbed their parents’ businesses or their old classrooms. The two who were suspected to become lawyers did. Some moved away, some never really arrived.
A high school built to stand two hundred years only makes it one hundred and eight. The chips each year took out now clearest in the rubble of what was an auditorium, classrooms, a few gargoyles on the perch. There was a champion team time and time again, in a century of sweat and shouts.
There was another option. It involved the military or the police, either recruited or disrupted by. Then, somehow, back at the pizza shop. There’s one on every corner.
A little dream dying the second it’s born, a rubberband snapping back to form.
Caroline Hayduk
Caroline Hayduk is a poet, editor, and educator. She holds an MA and MFA in Poetry from Wilkes University. She has been published in The Penn Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, Santa Fe Writers Project, and others. Night Bones is her debut chapbook. She is a full-time instructor of Writing at Luzerne County Community College and lives with her boyfriend/book designer, Eric, their two cats, and millions of trinkets.
April 2026 | nonfiction
Dreamscape
Trailing behind my partner Arnie and friend Tom, I ski toward Dreamscape lift down Déjà vu, an intermediate Park City run well within my skill set; I’m 69 with 35 years of experience under my parka although certainly not an expert. The air is afternoon crisp but my hands and toes are toasty thanks to my heated gloves and boots. I carve turn after turn after turn and hear my edges digging into the hard pack. The snow is slick. My mind wanders for a moment, a daydream maybe, and I miscalculate a turn. OHHH SHIIIIIIIT! I veer off the groomed terrain, impale my skis in a mogul, flip out of the bindings, catapult airborne, then land on my stomach and slide twenty feet down the hill. Somewhere along the way I hear a muffled crack. I let go of my ski poles, still oddly clenched in my hands, and roll over onto my back. I shake, shake, shake in shock. My right leg feels limp. Tom yells from below, “Can you get up or should I call ski patrol?” “Ski patrol,” I yell back. Pain begins to throb deep in my leg. The metallic taste of fear coats the inside of my mouth. Will my knee still bend? I don’t dare test it. I shake, shake, shake and I can’t make it stop! “Breathe,” I tell myself. “Breathe.” A panic attack will not help. I try to steel myself—such a weird expression. I think about Arnie who is likely at the lift and wondering where I am. Did she take a little tumble and have trouble getting up? Soon, the ski patrol will arrive with their tools and toboggan. I’ve watched them rescue other skiers after crashes and wipeouts and felt grateful I was upright. Now I will be their cargo, one of the fallen, wrapped in a blanket and ferried down the hill. I close my eyes and I wait, wishing, wishing, wishing this was all a dream.
Sharon Goldberg
Sharon Goldberg is a Seattle writer whose work has appeared/is forthcoming in The Gettysburg Review, The Citron Review, New Letters, The Louisville Review, Cold Mountain Review, River Teeth, Green Mountains Review, The Southern Indiana Review, The Lost Balloon, Best Small Fictions, and elsewhere. Sharon won second place in the On the Premises 2012 Humor Contest and Fiction Attic Press’s 2013 Flash in the Attic Contest. She is an avid but cautious skier and enthusiastic world traveler.
April 2026 | nonfiction
Relief Valve
It’s February and the power company is working on our building’s main heating line. We sit in our living room with big sweaters and pants and socks and sip tea, watching our breaths merge with the steam until we can’t tell which is which. Maybe it doesn’t matter—we’re all burning inside, anyways, while oxygen slowly combusts in our lungs. Sometimes I hear it crackle if the room is silent, but that’s only at 2am, when the metro stops running and the highway quiets. When all the people get to wherever they’re going. To wherever home is. I think people are always trying to get home however they can, the businessmen on the train and the junkies in the street, we’re all the same. We all take whatever bus comes first.
We live on the top floor of an 80-year-old apartment building. I didn’t know this before, but in old apartments, when they do work on the central heating, air pressure builds up at the tops of the pipes. They have to let it out with a tiny key that they twist into the gut of our radiator until water spurts like they hit an artery. I hover in the hallway while they clean up the mess and wonder whether I should ask them if they want something to drink. I’m not quick enough—they nod and head out, and then we have heat again. At least for a while. I’ve been finding comfort in things like these since you left: awkward interactions with handymen, not having heat, having heat again. Sometimes I’ll even smoke with the window wide open—but that’s nothing new, you’d say.
We turn the heat all the way up and finish our tea and sweat through our sweaters. The radiator burns if you touch it with the fleshy part of your palm, like I did to see if it was on. To check that they hadn’t only pretended to fix something that couldn’t be fixed. These aren’t metaphors—I think life just has a funny way of sticking the same thing under your nose over and over again, as if to say “look, this is what I meant.” I keep telling life “I understood you the first time,” but it’s no use. Life is busy going home and I’m getting older and you’re still dead. It’s too hot in our apartment. But listen: outside, it’s starting to snow.
Dara Goodale
Dara Goodale (they/them) is a Romanian-American queer multigenre writer and university student living in Lausanne, Switzerland. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Hayden’s Ferry Review, the American Poetry Journal, ANMLY, Cleaver Magazine, Thimble Literary Magazine, Sky Island Journal, and more. Dara is a Pushcart nominee and was a finalist for the Gasher Press 2025 Bennett Nieberg Transpoetic Broadside Prize. You can find them on Instagram @daragoodale and online at daragoodale.com
