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

STORY OF THE WEEK

The Queen of Providence

By Jane Lancellotti

Queenie couldn’t look away. The Portuguesa was very pregnant. How many weeks until the baby dropped? Hard to tell. Something form-fitting beneath the dress, a girdle, made it difficult to know.

POETRY

Fog

By Kwame Dawes

I keep rehearsing the things I could have said. Like, “Show me; all I want to do is see.” I have spent my life, at least those wayward years, in search of secrets; or secret things, and secret paths to things.

FINAL TWO WEEKS TO ENTER

Deadline: Fri., Nov. 13, at 11:59 p.m., PST.

Open to all fiction and nonfiction writers. We’re looking for short stories, essays, memoirs, photo essays, graphic stories, all forms of literary nonfiction, and excerpts.

Please see the Guidelines.

HIGH SCHOOL CONTEST WINNER

No, but I once got very close

By Michelle Li

I thought of shouting your name across the square. That was the year I kept talking to myself: I am good I am good I want to be loved. By you, I mean.

POETRY CONTEST WINNERS

Blood Root

By Mara Adamitz Scrupe

at Johnson’s plantation he saw somebody beat/ thinks it was him there being no overseer only him plowing & his voice boot & club ’til he fell

POETRY CONTEST WINNERS

Caput Mortuum

By Leah Brand

Layers of abstract grief remain calcified in my body, mineralized accretions older than memory or purpose, like flecks of caput mortuum

POETRY CONTEST WINNERS

Where I’m From

By Leila Chatti

There are three seasons: football, summer stark as the Rapture, and months when cold sits like a toppled glass of milk no one’s mopped up.

POETRY

First Frost over Harvested Fields

By Ted Kooser

Too dark before dawn to see them, but out there are lakes of pale silvery starlight, from one shore
to another

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

NARRATIVE OUTLOUD

CARTOONS

NARRATIVE OUTLOUD

Crossing Borders

By Javier Zamora

Zamora’s work transcends borders and speaks to the immigrant experience. Join us as he talks of his extraordinary journey.

CARTOONS

Cartoon Art Volume 2026-10

By Various Artists

Brand new cartoons by Suzy Becker, Kyle Bravo, David Gomberg, Mick Stevens, and Dan Misdea!

LEARN!

POEM OF THE WEEK

LEARN!

Narrative 10

By Daniel Mason

Words you use most on the page? Obidicut, Hobbididence, Mahu, Modo, Smulkin, Swithold, Pillicock, Turlygod, Flibbertigibbet.

POEM OF THE WEEK

i’m sorry, i’m sorry

By Chen Chen

this was her, my mother, apologizing. but then she added, you know, i’m chinese. as if i’m not also chinese, as if there’s only one, & it’s her.