Priscilla Long

January 2026 | fiction

One Day in the Life of Donna DeSimone

Donna, you will never become less deaf, her audiologist informs. Keep learning, she encourages herself. In ASL she has reached the letter L. Keep living. She buses down to Pike Place Market to purchase potatoes and greens, maybe collard. Downtown, she deboards into the midst of an ICE raid. Masked goons are throwing a well-dressed, screaming woman to the asphalt. People are holding up phone cameras, yelling Fuck you! Get out! A tall man is photographing. She knows that old camera. Husband of her youth. Why had she left him? Henry! He looks up. Donna! she sees his mouth say.

Priscilla Long

Priscilla Long is author of nine books including Cartographies of Home: Poems (MoonPath Press, 2026) and On Spaces and Colors (University of New Mexico Press, 2026). Her work has appeared in publications such as The Hudson Review, The Southern Review, and The American Scholar. Her awards include a National Magazine Award and ten of her essays have been honored as “notable” in various years of Best American Essays. She has an MFA from the University of Washington and grew up on a dairy farm on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. To learn more, go to www.priscillalong.com.

Jim Ross

January 2026 | visual art

Rained Upon Rose 4 - Jim Ross

Rained Upon Rose 4

Jim Ross

Jim Ross jumped into creative pursuits in 2015 after a rewarding career in public health research. With a graduate degree from Howard University, he has, in ten years, published nonfiction, fiction, poetry, photography, hybrid works, interviews, and plays in 200+ journals on five continents. Photo publications include Barnstorm, Blue Mesa, Burningword, Invisible City, Orion, Phoebe, and Stonecoast. Photo-essays include Burningword, Kestrel, Litro, NWW, Sweet, and Typehouse. His most recent interview, published by Terrain.org, was conducted with an artist. A Best of the Net nominee in Nonfiction and Art, he also wrote/acted in a one-act play and appeared in a documentary limited series broadcast internationally. Jim’s family splits time between the city and the mountains.

Carlos Cunha

January 2026 | nonfiction

Monochrome Lane

The strip mall may well be on its last legs, but it still litters the landscape of many American towns and suburbs, especially here in Florida – an aggressively charmless, deservedly unloved suburban phenomenon that usually consists of nothing more than a basic parking lot with, at one end, a drably functional strip of windowed boxes that are usually rented out to low-end retail businesses, some local, some nation or regional chains, their motley commercial signage usually obeying no single design standard.

Running an errand on my bike one afternoon, I came to the example of this phenomenon nearest to where I live, a fairly large one, and, to avoid the unpredictable driving of cars using the busier sections of its expansive and otherwise mostly empty parking lot, I chose to cut through the service lane that runs between the back of the stores and some woods and wetlands where, as a bonus, I thought I might spot some interesting water fowl, although what ended up catching my eye instead was the back of the strip mall itself, and how extreme an aggravation you might say it was of the drabness in front. If the front looked drab, the back was drabness itself, because all of it was painted one color, a light, muddy yellow-brown. The effect was eerie, and ended up seeming even artful. It was as though a revealing statement were being made about the deceptive nature of the front, about how, behind commerce’s meretricious variety, lies a drably monochromatic, rather industrial sameness. And it was a statement that, sadly, could have extended to the lives of those suburban residents, including me, whom this strip mall was intended to serve. Not only were the backs of the different stores not distinguished by differing hues, the features on those buildings were not, so that I had to concentrate to notice, then to identify, the things camouflaged by that monochrome mudslide of yellow. The building backs were deprived not only of difference but, practically, of a third dimension, the clayey quality of the paint being such that it seemed to elude shadows, flattening doorknobs, locks, door jambs, vents, grills, lamp standards, lamp shades, awnings, AC plants, large industrial alarm bells, sundry wires, cables, pipes, casings. It called to mind the desert topography of long-dead worlds where all features are merely vestigial.

So it came almost as a shock when one of those vestigial doors swung open and someone — a living person, a woman, a worker — appeared, backing out uncertainly. It turned out that she was pulling a shopping cart after her, and her hesitancy had to do with the fact that the cart was piled high with precariously perched empty brown boxes, the sameness of their color echoing the sameness of the color of the back of the strip mall, as if delivering the same dismaying message.

 

Carlos Cunha

Carlos Cunha is a journalist. His literary writing was noted in the Best American Essays 2019 anthology edited by Rebecca Solnit, and he has been published in the Kenyon Review, TriQuarterly, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and a Seattle Review edition edited by David Shields. Born in Portugal, he grew up in South Africa and lives in Gainesville, Florida.