Phoebe Stone

How easily I can remember that small parlor with the tiny coal fireplace in England. That room, that house, seems to come in clearer and stronger every year that I grow older. The tall upright piano took up much of the room, that piano where I tried, when I was ten, to play the “Coventry Christmas Carol.” It was bitterly cold in that row house in Cambridge, England. There was no central heat in those days, and in the bedroom we had to stand in front of an electric heater to change into our pajamas.

Alison C. Rollins

Spades is a way of life for black folks.
My mother went into labor
In the middle of a game.
I was born as

Five and a possible. She said
She’d felt no greater pain than that loss,
Than when she turned away, shamefaced
In the midst of kin,

When certain bragging rights began to crown.

Samantha Libby

This is the place where dragons once lived and will one day be born again. Here mythical beasts lie waiting, growing, plotting, and scheming. Chinko is an easy place to introduce, but a difficult place to get to. At Chinko, you begin on an airstrip, a small dirt line in a lawless place. If you wanted, you could put your pack on your shoulders and walk all the way to Darfur and not encounter a single road. 

Raven Leilani

My mother spends an hour easing the chest open, depositing jaundiced pieces of lung into cloudy glasses of formalin. She tilts her head and smiles, tongue pressed into the gap in her teeth.

A spongy layer of yellow fat, flush against slack purple muscle, a freckled lung—after death, all organs become indiscreet.