in the center of my heart they buried a limewood carving of a bird.
(poetry)
Author: Another Chicago Magazine
[A year after COVID’s US arrival, ACM looks back.]
We found a way of existing where we didn’t have to know who lived and who died.
(nonfiction)
With each video, I knew Pete was getting closer to his death. I never believed he would make it out alive.
(nonfiction)
This is, in one sense, all of us talking. Although you’re not in a context at the moment where you were expecting to speak.
(drama)
I had the gun now because it made me feel safe for myself, Dean, and the rest of the monitors at this poll site. It made me feel safe in the way that the president’s people were made to feel safe when he exercised his gun-lobby muscle and equivocated about good people being on “both sides” of an incendiary protest scenario.
(nonfiction)
It’s while waiting for the light at the corner of Twenty-eighth and Sixth Avenue that you first hear it: a soft hissing sound.
(fiction)
She’d come to California a couple weeks before, staying with her brother, reminding me of how my mom relied, at times, on my Uncle Ken.
(nonfiction)
How could / the hand’s reflexive twitch undo centuries of survival? / Something as simple as an approaching outlier of thunder / cause devastation to a thing come so far?
(poetry)
Every day their breath brushes back and forth / like wind erosion over the etched inscriptions / that say our veterans are our heroes.
(poetry)
Chicago, / I’ll stick around as long as you’ll take me or leave me.
(poetry)
what can somewhere provide beside a concrete babbling brook / with loose boulders.
(poetry)
It had crushed her trailer / while she watched / Queen for a Day / on a TV crowned with rabbit ears.
(poetry)
Robber barons are laughing themselves silly as they devour your / neighbors. / Don’t worry. / It’s not you they are after.
(poetry)
“Carol Ann Davis makes us ache in these essays and lets the quiet moments explode within our hearts,” writes reviewer S.T. Brant.
(nonfiction reviews)
Years passed. The joke continued. So did the dustings.
(nonfiction)
Malé is now the besieged capital of the submerged Maldives, built up precariously on the ruins of oil tanks and docking derricks, apartment blocks and concrete breakwaters.
(fiction)
Walking changed her.
(nonfiction)
Who knew so many people needed relationship advice from lawyers?
(drama)
Her keys might have opened the church, and she the one to serve sponge fingers like death.
(The Loop)
You waltz in here, a first-time patient, and act like we owe you something.
(drama)
So now what are we going to do?
(nonfiction)
The invisible turns home into battlegrounds and destroys the romance between man and woman. These details never make it to history books.
(nonfiction)
With boys comes a lot of stress. You worry about how you can buy him his own place, or you worry about who he’ll bring into your house.
(fiction)
A cacophony of voices inquiring, wanting to disentangle the mysteries of the tattoos like hieroglyphs, pictograms.
(fiction)
“The poet’s love-hate relationship with her laptop becomes fully realized in ‘Off the Web,’ as too much time on the internet leads to feeling ‘my dress / gather headwinds and swirl, then lift
like / Marilyn’s over a grate,'” writes Richard Holinger.
(review)
What’s wrong with circles? What shape is your wedding ring?
(drama)
I’ve chosen to work with concrete to speak about the impulse to create permanent structures, but also to speak about impermanence, change, and loss, Ledelle Moe tells Helena Feder.
“Geter’s lines don’t so much hum as slice, visually cutting into the page like claws digging for answers in a ground that will not give,” writes reviewer Phillip B. Williams.
(review)
Her mother continued to hand her things: that lost dollar, a Chinese cookie fortune, one missing pearl earring.
(fiction)
from their beacon hands / glow worldwide welcomes and a thousand smiles.
(poetry)
Another Chicago Magazine 