October 2025 | nonfiction
Between Starbucks and Malibu Yogurt
Eight of us sit in Sunset Plaza, sipping our lackluster decaf Americanos a little too slowly, savoring our last few moments outside The Center. The non-caffeinated version doesn’t taste the same as the real stuff, but caffeine is barred in treatment. Too many of us abused it as an appetite suppressant.
I catch Maritza eyeing the frozen yogurt shop longingly—another anorexic food group. In treatment, it’s either real ice cream or gelato, no low-fat, low-calorie substitutions. If you’re not getting your period, it’s full-fat ice cream for you. She sucks down the rest of her iced coffee. Black with two Splenda. No milk, never milk.
A man so tan I can make out white lines around his wrists where woven bracelets must have once been walks his golden retriever around the parking lot. The man is beautiful, and so is the dog. The dog’s coat looks show-ready, spun gold. I forget myself, where I am, and who I’m with, so I admire them, wondering what kind of life these two live and what kind of home they’ll return to.
Then, I hear Maritza whisper, Dog. Dog. Where’s Chloe? The word “dog” spreads around our circle, a panicked, high-stakes game of telephone. Get the message to the CNA before Chloe sees the dog. If we can warn the CNA, she can remove Chloe from the vicinity, we can avoid Chloe’s biggest trigger. We’re too late, though. Chloe sees the dog and thinks of her father’s hands. She puts her head between her knees and starts rocking back and forth, moaning long and low.
Two girls, late teens, walk out of Malibu Yogurt. They use their tongues to pick gummy worms, pieces of Oreo, and Heath Bar off the top of their curated dessert peaks. The girls see Chloe rocking back and forth, back and forth, and avert their eyes. I stare at them. I will them to look at me, I will them to look back at Chloe, I will them to walk away.
They quicken their pace when they reach the parking lot, giggling behind their palms. Once in the car, the driver rolls down all the windows, and the passenger takes her hair down. I watch them peel onto the 101 heading south. The passenger lets her hand dangle out the window, and I keep my eyes on their car until I can’t anymore, and I have no choice but to turn back.
Miranda Morgan
Miranda Morgan is a writer who proudly hails from Santa Fe, New Mexico. She has worked as a writer and producer for various docuseries and unscripted TV projects. Her TV credits include series that have appeared (or will appear) on networks such as History Channel, Animal Planet, Discovery, INSP, PBS, Fox, and others. In 2019, Miranda was awarded a Fulbright Grant to Bergen, Norway, where she taught academic writing workshops and the very first creative writing class at the University of Bergen. She earned her MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Montana and is at work on her first novel. She is a Visiting Professor of English at Pacific Lutheran University.
October 2025 | poetry
Tract Housing, 1950s
My father pushes a red mower
with swirling blades he sharpens
first, scraping a black stone over
every spiral edge. His grass is precisely
one inch high from top
to bottom.
I roll in the neat cut, stubble pricks
my cheek. Sneeze. Face down
damp ground, green spears pierce
near wormholes, miniature mountains,
volcanoes spewed by ridged wriggles,
dark pink, tubular, timid.
One Sunday morning he rents
a boat, rows us into the harbor
to drop hooks. Our bait is night
crawlers. They’re bigger than
regular worms and try harder
to escape, and you can dig
them only after dark.
They bite and squirm when
he stabs them with the hook,
jams them down till the insides
ooze out. We catch three flat
flounder. A bottom feeder
now it’s old, one has two eyes
on its back, none on the white
belly. He slits them open,
scrapes out the guts, slices off
the head. That night, we bite
white flesh on white
plates, wield engraved
silver forks and knives.
I know he doesn’t like me
flattening the grass, but
I can’t help myself.
Karen Kilcup
Raised in the area the Abenaki people called Quascacunquen, Karen Kilcup is the Elizabeth Rosenthal Excellence Professor Emerita at UNC Greensboro. She is a past president of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers and the Robert Frost Society. Her academic books include Fallen Forests: Emotion, Embodiment, and Ethics in American Women’s Environmental Writing, 1781-1924, which was supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship and was named a Choice magazine Outstanding Academic Title, as was her Who Killed American Poetry?: From National Obsession to Elite Possession. Since 2020, Kilcup has focused on writing poetry and has published in numerous anthologies and journals, including Poetry East, Minnesota Review, and Poet Lore. Her book The Art of Restoration (2023) was awarded the 2021 Winter Goose Poetry Prize, and her chapbook, Red Appetite (2023), received the 2022 Helen Kay Poetry Chapbook Prize. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she has a second chapbook, Black Nebula (2023). The title poem from her second full-length collection, Feathers and Wedges (2024), was awarded the 2022 Julia Peterkin Literary Award for Poetry. She lives in the seacoast of New Hampshire with her partner Alan, in the company of skunks, bobcats, coyotes, foxes, otters, fishers, and bears.
October 2025 | nonfiction
Transfer
Long crooked stem, blunt thorns, deep red, tight center, black ridging outer petals that curled back—I forget how I acquired the rose. People were always giving me flowers, but I bought them, too. I could guess a bouquet’s price in any neighborhood, or vased on someone’s shelf, with stunning accuracy. I picked up many a five that way, guessing to the penny, knowing that if I bet more I’d feel too guilty to take the money. I was waiting to transfer at the 168th street station, a dank cavern sepia-ed in failing light and staling urine. It took anywhere from five to one hundred fifty—but usually forty—minutes for the train to come. I read Moby Dick and War and Peace on the subway, but that night I had Beloved. When I felt nervous I took a cab, reasoning that if I got attacked I’d kick myself if I’d ignored my instincts, but it was a long way to Inwood. Cab drivers always tried to take the bridge, because they didn’t believe Manhattan went up that high; I’d have to fight to keep them on the Henry Hudson—a repeating course in assertion. I was nineteen. Some drivers asked me out, some confessed that they were on drugs, one muttered over and over that I was as tender as a young brussel sprout, but we were above 176th, and I was scared to make him pull over and let me out on the dark un-sidewalked thoroughfare — there was no riverwalk then—so if I felt OK, I’d save the twenty dollars. I slipped the rose into the triangles of space between the crooked elbows and concave chest of a long thin homeless man, hugging himself as he slept it off on a bench, then chose a place to stand where I’d see anyone approaching (I wasn’t dressed for the walk of shame and thought it was obvious that I was waitress coming home with a wad of cash and wanted to be ready) and watch the rats emerge from the tracks, the third rail, the garbage, the puddles, and the chunked-out walls exactly as they emerged if you were hallucinating them coming down from acid or X while I waited and read. Two chattering women crossed the platform. I did not fear them; I saved my fear for men. They looked dressed for church or a baby shower—vinyl pumps with ankle-wobbling heels, pastel polyester dresses with deep ruffled necklines. Tiny hats. Stiff curls with banded grooves where bobby pins had recently secured plastic rollers. The bar closed at four and it took until five to get out of there, and I’d made it this far from the village, the women were probably headed to an early service. They were loud and bright, and I watched them without turning my head. One slipped the rose out, like a Pick Up Stick, or a Kerplunk skewer, without waking the sleeper, but her friend said, “that’s not for you” and made her put it back.
MFC Feeley
MFC Feeley has an MFA in fiction from the University of Alaska Fairbanks and is a board member of 49 Writers. She wrote a series of ten stories inspired by the Bill of Rights for Ghost Parachute and has published in Best Micro-Fictions, SmokeLong, Jellyfish Review, Pulp Literature, and others. Her one-minute memoir was featured on Brevity Blog. Feeley was a writer in residence at The National Willa Cather Center and a Fellow at the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. She has been nominated for Best Small Fictions, The Pushcart Prize, was an Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Quarterfinalist, and has judged for Scholastic. More at MFCFeeley.com
