ESSAY | Trying To See – Erin Ruble

On a sunny September day in the early 1990s, a German couple taking a shortcut through the rock spires on the Austrian-Italian border spotted the head and back of a man jutting from a patch of half-melted ice. The couple, thinking they’d stumbled across the corpse of a mountaineer, told the owner of the inn they were staying at. He, in turn, contacted the authorities, who sent a forensic investigator.

COMFORT FOODS // Ends and Pieces – Lisa Ochoa

You’ve probably never noticed them. Their red and white box usually sits well below their thick-cut, smoked, and maple-flavored cousins in their clear ‘look at me!’ packaging. Or, sometimes, Ends and Pieces aren’t displayed at all, and you have to ask the butcher for them. Because mind you, they are the ends and pieces, the leftovers, the scraps. Who would want them?

My mom, that’s who.

ONE POEM – Brian Alkire

That albino slug
looks like mobile marzipan,
bending its neck for a nap
in the stitchwort
tufted beside the road.

ONE POEM – Miriam Ashford

If you walk along a path
between forest and shore
between grains eroded by the sea
they were mountains once

ONE POEM – Emily Tee

and there, by the weekend-quiet school, at the edge of the pavement, was the mouse
lying on its side, a small trickle of blood / from its open mouth

ONE POEM – Susan Shea

we can sit next to each other
looking out in the same direction
at our life smudges
together

Angela Townsend – Inky

No one saw the tattoo coming. In high school, I was not voted Most Likely To Get Inked. I was not voted Seventeenth Most Likely To Get Inked. No, I was the girl for whom they had to invent a new yearbook category: Most Likely To Attend Seminary. At sleepovers, I squiggled under the covers…

Steelers Country — Travis Dahlke

I convince Landa to be my accomplice as she culls rotten lettuce heads. They let Landa wear a knife on her belt. She has a weak heart and I think destroying crops makes her feel powerful.