TABLE OF CONTENTS
Minna Zallman Proctor
Editor’s Letter
Inevitably, the road to clarity lies in allowing everything to get much more complicated. In the meantime, and along the way, the battle continues—messily, broadly, unsilenced…
Julie Hanson
Dominion and Volume
He crows to prepare our yards with his presence,
and he orders the space between us. He stands it up straight…
Amina Gautier
Penelope
O to unravel and unknit the thread all the way back to her girlhood, when life promised so much more than waiting…
Rachael Fowler
Mother Static
Stretch marks graffitied along my hips are jagged, but delicate, thin enough to puncture with a pencil tip…
Sara Emanuel Viloria
Patria o muerte—¡Vinceremos!
Eat Shit, Horseface
translated from Spanish by David Brunson
She remembers, in those days,
When a man told her to eat shit, horseface…
Halimah Marcus
The Long Run
Nothing was different except the fact that a few miles away, the late train had left without her…
Tina Cane POETRY
Essay on Poetics or Early Morning Texting with Orlando
from What We Talk About When We Talk About Paths: A Narrative in Captions
…shadows vibrate like voices…
Effy Morris
Bear Man
I prayed for the bears, prayed they wouldn’t be harmed in the Civil War, and prayed they would live until I could find their secret…
Rennie Ament
I Am a Spongiologist
…When you shower with a sponge you’re rubbing yourself with a soft skeleton.
Wynne Hungerford
Clean Exit
Honeydew
There are enough people suffering, I mean really suffering, that it warrants a special kind of restaurant…
Lisa Allen Ortiz
Filling Station
Algorithm
And joy is a stupid thing
untethered to language or insight…
Madeline Cash
Hostage #4
I’m thirteen and I look like a child bride in my Confirmation dress…
Nikki Wallschlaeger
Society
The man in front of me lets me go because I’m a woman,
it’s long been a ruling that women and children go first…
Ashley Hand
Cable Knit Sweaters for Motherless Lambs
I’d sit inside the yawning ribcage of a low-bellied stegosaurus, where its phantom lungs used to be, and eat my burrito out of tin foil and drink champagne from a thermos…
Chiara Naomi
My Friend Wears Ohio on a Chain
Because I came home I became
estranged / but in a soft
way…
CONTRIBUTORS
Amina Gautier is the author of three short story collections: At-Risk,Now We Will Be Happy, and The Loss of All Lost Things.At-Risk was awarded the Flannery O’Connor Award; Now We Will Be Happy was awarded the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction; The Loss of All Lost Things was awarded the Elixir Press Award in Fiction. More than one hundred and twenty-five of her stories have been published, appearing in Agni, Blackbird, Boston Review, Callaloo, Glimmer Train, Joyland, Kenyon Review, Latino Book Review, New Flash Fiction Review, Passages North, Quarterly West, Saturday Evening Post, and Southern Review among other places. For her body of work she has received the PEN/MALAMUD Award for Excellence in the Short Story.
Ashley Hand is a service academy graduate and spent her career as a military officer deploying around the world. She left the military in 2018 to pursue an MFA at Cornell University. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, West Branch, and elsewhere. She currently lives and writes in upstate New York, where she is at work on her first novel.
Chiara Naomi is a first-year at Wesleyan University majoring in English and French. Infamous for exceeding word-counts, it is ironic that she is a 2020 honorable mention recipient of Wesleyan’s Hamilton Prize for her flash fiction. She is a 2019/2020 honorable mention recipient of The London Magazine’s Short Story Prize, and her poetry has been long-listed for and published in the anthology of Live Canon’s 2019 Poetry Prize. She aspires to teach high school English, but currently listens to girl in red while reading dense books about language. This is her first publication in a literary journal.
Effy Morris writes, makes, and thinks to explore the tenuous boundaries of form, gender, sexuality, and space. Currently a PhD student in English at Concordia University, s/he/y is a research assistant for the Centre for Expanded Poetics and co-editor of the forthcoming online publication o bod.
Halimah Marcus’s short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in the Indiana Review, Gulf Coast, One Story, BOMB, and The Southampton Review. She is the executive director of Electric Literature, an innovative digital publisher based in Brooklyn, and the editor of its weekly fiction magazine, Recommended Reading. She is also the editor of Horse Girls, an anthology that reclaims and recasts the horse girl stereotype, forthcoming in 2021. Halimah lives in New York.
Julie Hanson’s second collection, The Audible and the Evident, won the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize and was released in unintended synchrony with the spread of the coronavirus across the United States. Her first collection, Unbeknownst won the Iowa Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the 2012 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Hanson’s poetry has earned fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Vermont Studio Center and recent or forthcoming publication in Smartish Pace, New Ohio Review, Under a Warm Green Linden, failbetter.com, Plume, Bat City Review, and Copper Nickel.
Lisa Allen Ortiz is the author of Guide to the Exhibit, winner of the 2016 Perugia Press Prize and two chapbooks: Self Portrait as a Clock and Turns Out. Her poems have appeared in Colorado Review, Zyzzyva, and Beloit Poetry Journal and have been featured on Verse Daily and in the anthology Best New Poets.
This is Lisa Allen Ortiz’s third appearance in TLR. You can read more of her work here.
Madeline Cash is a writer living and working in Los Angeles. She runs the Forever reading series. You can find her on Instagram @madelinecash
Nikki Wallschlaeger’s work has been featured in The Nation, Brick, American Poetry Review, Witness, Kenyon Review, POETRY, and others. She is the author of the full-length collections Houses and Crawlspace as well as the graphic book I Hate Telling You How I Really Feel from Bloof Books. She is also the author of an artist book called “Operation USA,” through the Baltimore-based book arts group Container, a project acquired by Woodland Pattern Book Center in Milwaukee. Her third collection, Waterbaby, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in 2021.
Rachael Fowler is pursuing her PhD in Fiction at the University of Southern Mississippi’s Center for Writers. Her stories have been published in Prime Number Magazine and Deep South Magazine. She currently serves as Associate Editor of Mississippi Review.
Rennie Ament’s poetry has appeared in West Branch, Minnesota Review, Bat City Review, Sixth Finch and Colorado Review, among others. She is the runner-up for the 2019 Erskine J. Poetry Prize from Smartish Pace, winner of the 2018 Yellowwood Poetry Prize from Yalobusha Review, a finalist for the 2018 Anzaldúa Poetry Prize from Newfound, and a nominee for both the Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets. A recipient of fellowships from the Millay Colony, the Saltonstall Foundation, the New York State Summer Writers Institute and the Vermont Studio Center, she lives in Maine and online at www.rennieament.com
Sara Emanuel Viloria, Venezuelan poet, researches and practices both two-dimensional conceptual illustration and watercolor, as well as digital illustration. Viloria incorporates fine art themes into her narrative and poetry—a distinct characteristic of her work—in which she writes to “heal” the wounded canvas. Her poetry has been anthologized in the Antologiadel II Festival Internacional de Santiago, and published in the plaquette Incendiario by the Chilean-Venezuelan journal and press Los Poetas del Cinco.
Tina Cane serves as poet laureate of Rhode Island and is the founder/director of Writers-in-the-Schools, RI. She is the author of Once More with Feeling , Body of Work , and Dear Elena: Letters for Elena Ferrante. Tina is also the creator/ curator of the distance reading series, Poetry is Bread, the podcast Poetry Dose, and is a 2020 poet laureate fellow with the Academy of American Poets.
Wynne Hungerford‘s work has appeared in EPOCH, Subtropics, Blackbird, The Brooklyn Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, American Literary Review, The Normal School, and SmokeLong Quarterly, among other places.