ALL CREATIVE NONFICTION, FLASH FICTION & POEMS

The day after Prince died. I’m in Minneapolis, watching a ballet. At the end, they dedicate two songs to an icon, encourage a dance party...

If I did not fall in love with beauty, wrote Amiri Baraka, I’d be cooler Beauty took a vicious turn at a juncture of love and...

An Irish American Mississippi Choctaw climbs the stairs Of a battered river tugboat mounted Atop a Saint Paul, Minnesota museum High on a...

We are color-blinded by race, a society of half truths where people skim by indifferent to the divides, categorizing them in groups...

My mother puts garlic salt on everything. Sprinkling it on, she says, “Garlic makes everything taste better.” She even puts it on me....

Sometimes you have to use your last dollar seventy-five for a ride. Because sleeping on the bus is better than sleeping outside. I don’t...

When the sky is empty and the hungry blue Would flip the earth and devour us I hope for gray blankets To drape across it, Turn the sun to...

I learned about listening from my grandmother Ruth who allowed great silences to live and breathe in a conversation. She then would say...

Kinda clammy, kinda wet, the goldfish kinda needs a vet. A little pale and looking ill, the doctor thinks she needs some pills. The pills...

I imagine this is what it’s like to be a bee standing on the inside of a large window— nothing but the vast landscape of possibility in...

Away from his family, not knowing his mother’s recipes for empanadas or arepas, and the markets only catering to Mexicans, he would buy...

I wish to lay before this world the last universal ancestor, to learn every word for grandmother, to enter a state of natural competence,...

An urban chicken named Nancy nesting in the birdbath laid an egg today and afterward walked around the yard with a fluffed chest holding...

Tell her on a cloudless afternoon— a Sunday in November, maybe, after the leaves have fallen and the ground’s first hard freeze, or...

What are you? they probe; queries like cold instruments But I find no words to describe the mixing of my blood, This body that seems no...

We, some ticking legacies, tend our gentle life beeps and together betray the old I won’t register on the seismograph thought. Standing...

two crows side by side— we all need companionship when the trees are bare Poem: KELLY WESTHOFF writes haiku and finds the process of...

It’s not hard to go swimming at night, so long as the surface is calm. Stars shine on themselves and you, venturing farther from shore,...

Planted here as we are, see how we want to bow and sway with the motion of earth in sky. Feel how desire vibrates within us as our...

With a touch of my mittened finger bug zapping space heaters burn yellow at the 21 Uptown/84 Express bus stop on the corner of Snelling...