Narrative Magazine | Writers, Fiction, Poetry, Storytelling, Nonfiction, Art

STORY OF THE WEEK

The Third Bird

By Kaitlin Roberts

What they needed was to be themselves. To be among their kind. I had tried to prove myself through sacrifice, but the real test was letting go.

POEM OF THE WEEK

Tidal Motif

By Henk Rossouw

I speak at the edge of something else—Pacific asters sinuate in the wind, the shorebirds arriving and leaving without cease, your fingers arthritic.

FINAL WEEKS TO ENTER

Deadline: Wed., July 29, at 11:59 p.m., PST.

“Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language,” wrote Lucille Clifton, and we couldn’t agree more. We’re looking for work that moves with intention, that reveals something we didn’t know we were missing.

POETRY

What It Requires

By Sharon Olds

I do not know the extremes of feeling. I have been protected from them, I have protected myself. The depths of being I’ve observed but not felt—too afraid to feel.

POETRY

This Wednesday

By Katie Condon

Where is the door that will take us to the inner world, the one where memory lives unburdened by our ability to recall it? It’s easy to take stock of this place, this Wednesday in a library.

POETRY

His Last Days

By Dan Gerber

He saw each bird as a kind of feeling he’d known, imagining its movements as his own. Thrill of cool water finding its way between feathers and let himself become feathers.

POETRY

The Murder of Louisa Suckraw

By Ted Kooser

There are too many stories under these pine cones, this sod, to remember them all, but Louisa Suckraw’s is gouged in stone. It tells and tells.

POETRY

White Birds

By Maria Giesbrecht

At three, I stepped on Dad’s liquor bottle and now there’s a robin’s nest, faint and white, on the inside of my left foot.

POETRY

Sweeter

By Yong-Yu Huang

This is what passes for dreaming in the blue house, the decay of my good days. Again, the bowl of fruit awash in the creeping light.

POETRY

Illicit

By Cate Lycurgus

touching you is a dash in the paragraph of not touching you fragment in the sentence of not seeing you seeing you is a colon amid clauses of not seeing

POETRY

Long Love—Betsy and Andrew Wyeth

By Melissa McKinstry

What I want to know is, will someone in the future, after stringed instruments disappear, remember the sound? Music’s evanescence, like smoke swirled and held in a jar.

POETRY

My Daughter’s Daughter Is Sad

By Luisa Muradyan

My mother’s mother had to keep her mother on the tenth floor of our Soviet apartment building. There was no elevator and no way for her to get outside during the day.

POETRY

A Posteriori

By Ananya Kanai Shah

Now the years recant in a clean, even stroke. In the annex of the mind, a chair. From it I watch the city swirl into renaissance, toad-like cars chasing their own vapor.

POETRY

The Legend of Zelda

By Brian Tierney

All we wanna do is play Nintendo till it’s dark out and can’t, the grid’s still down. Blackout to last another day and the heat for three and the Phils are blowing a wildcard chance, WHYY reports.

FICTION

CLASSIC

FICTION

The Red Shoes

By Lavanya Vasudevan

At her nalangu, the girl would not sit quietly on the wooden plank and let us paint her feet with turmeric. She put on her strange red shoes.

CLASSIC

The Weary Blues

By Langston Hughes

I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

STORY CONTEST WINNERS

Private Planet

By Dina Kleiner

Picturing herself in the future was a comfort because it was a confirmation. She believed any confirmation at all, desirable or undesirable, was favorable over the unknown.

STORY CONTEST WINNERS

Regional Hospitals

By Alice Ryan

She has no recollection of any restaurant, but she knows how important it is to her father that his old life connects to his new life, so she nods into the pitch-black of the car park of the regional hospital.

STORY CONTEST WINNERS

The Day of the Dog

By Maria Giesbrecht

Working. That has been our entire world for the two months that we and other Mennonite families have come from Mexico to work in Canada. “Good, honest, godly work,” Father says. “We’ll be blessed.”

CARTOONS

GRAPHIC STORY

CARTOONS

Cartoon Art Volume 2026-06

By Various Artists

Let these toons by Kyle Bravo, J.C. Duffy, Rose Anne Prevec, P. C. Vey, and Kaamran Hafeez brighten your day.

GRAPHIC STORY

My Father

By Shannon Wheeler

In 1967 he adopted an Open Land Policy: anyone who wanted could come and live for free.

LEARN!

FEATURES

LEARN!

Letters to a Young Writer

By Richard Bausch

You can make your own way in the world, and in your own life make sure you never utter one epithet that takes away another human being’s dignity.

FEATURES

Best Advice

By Kirstin Valdez Quade

The fiction writer must merge with the character on the page and see things clearly though the character’s eyes.