The streets were empty except for a woman walking a dog. Roy ran across to her and said, “Excuse me, lady, but there’s a dead guy lying on the sidewalk over there.”
POEM OF THE WEEK
Closer Now to Blindness in Early Spring
By Julia B. Levine
You understand the meadowlarks’ song marks where their yellow breasts necklaced in a black V have disappeared into the darkness of me.
FINAL WEEK TO ENTER
Deadline: Fri., March 31, at midnight, PDT.
We’re looking for short stories, essays, memoirs, photo essays, graphic stories, and excerpts from long fiction and nonfiction.
Year in and out, many of our authors receive notable awards, including the BASS and O. Henry prize, and many others. You can find their works here.
NARRATIVE FIRSTS
First-time authors are a regular feature in Narrative. Read the works of some of the remarkable poets and writers who first appeared here.
FALL CONTEST WINNERS
FALL CONTEST WINNERS
FALL CONTEST WINNERS
FALL CONTEST WINNERS
Straight Home
By Janet Burroway
In the movies lovers say, “I have never felt like this.” But this isn’t the movies. It’s a hollow in her midsection that sets the rhythm of her heart awry.
FALL CONTEST WINNERS
Blake Haveman
By Andrew Steiner
Three days earlier, when she’d come to the farm for her interview, he’d caught the scent of her body odor. It smelled good, like the rind of a bitter fruit.
FALL CONTEST WINNERS
Sea Mud
By Tiffany Isaacs
She suspects the sea is an illusion, an invention of her mind pressed on the moving, breathing, million-celled prism of light and shadow, water and bone.
FICTION
FICTION
FICTION
FICTION
Sky Tumbling Down
By Emily Besh
He could remember seeing the bear approaching from behind and getting words out just quick enough that his father had time to turn and shoot. But barely.
FICTION
The Saturday Morning Institute of Human Survival
By Carol Dines
The room was full of the kind of people I’d never met in graduate school—mostly guys in motorcycle garb with big guts and well-displayed tattoos.
FICTION
Crows, 1950
By Heinz Insu Fenkl
He was the son of a farmer, the one meant to become a scholar, who’d failed and become a professor of nonsense—an ŏngtŏripaksa.
FICTION
FICTION
FICTION
FICTION
The Applicant
By Nazlı Koca
The moment I saw that Berlin was not a film set but a real, dark, and thrilling home to so many vagabonds, I knew I’d make it my home.
FICTION
Act III
By Jill McCorkle
Who knew it was the first sign of this other thing—benign or malignant? Good or evil? Isn’t the whole world split that way?
FICTION
Dusters
By David McGlynn
Two years after surgery, Thorst still went to physical therapy three days a week. His knee wasn’t getting better and at this point it probably wouldn’t.
NONFICTION
NONFICTION
NARRATIVE 10
NONFICTION
A Palazzo in Florence
By Bill Barich
On the train from Pisa to Florence, we ate salami and focaccia and watched the Arno make its sluggish way through Tuscany in the brutal heat.
NONFICTION
Ringworm and the Blue Madonna
By Phoebe Stone
Everything soon became lost, spent in the wind. Nothing was permanent, no friend I made, no math test. No grade I received mattered because it would soon be left behind.
NARRATIVE 10
Narrative 10
By Will Schwalbe
When it’s first thing in the morning, I still have the illusion that I can accomplish anything I want to, and everything I need to. By 10 a.m. that illusion is gone.
NARRATIVE OUTLOUD
NARRATIVE OUTLOUD
CLASSICS
NARRATIVE OUTLOUD
The Writing Process
By Donald Hall
I’ve always been interested in people’s processes. A lot of people go long times without writing, and then are overtaken by something and can’t stop.
NARRATIVE OUTLOUD
Tom Jenks on Editing The Garden of Eden
By Tom Jenks
Tom Jenks discusses his editing of Hemingway’s work and his thoughts about the book’s legacy. Until now, Jenks has discussed his Hemingway work only sparingly.
CLASSICS
May 3, 1915
By Marina Tsvetaeva
I don’t mind that right in front of me you take someone else in your arms; I’m glad you don’t curse me out just because it’s not you that I kiss.
POETRY
POETRY
POETRY
POETRY
Dusklight and Other Poems
By Colin Bailes
Even now the bees are bathing in honeysuckle blossom, transferring pollen from stamen to pistil, changing gum into gold in the process.
POETRY
Daydreaming
By DeeSoul Carson
Our planet revolves around a black hole, skating the edge of the event horizon. I know my loved ones by the names we have given our shadows.
POETRY
Silent Night
By Caroline Falzone
It was winter in Vermont. White trees glittered, everything perfect as a snowglobe, calmed, on the mantel. My mother had recently lost her mother.
POETRY
POETRY
POETRY
POETRY
For Richard
By Henry Goldkamp
if I live today mostly quiet
if a person can sing
if you get away from the city
if you've robbed any churches
if you’ve thought about this
POETRY
Letters to God after Seeing a Sign for the National Shrine of the Infant Jesus of Prague in Prague, Oklahoma
By Tory Huff
There is something godlike in naming a place. As if by naming it, you are also creating it. A field is just a field until you name it.
POETRY
Mise en Place
By Anthony Immergluck
Somewhere, in all this body, I must contain a delicacy. Some sickly sweet, some ambergris, some rare and piquant cut. In all this souring, in all this toxic, find a part to smoke or cure.
POETRY
POETRY
POETRY
POETRY
The Seventh Seal
By Maja Lukic
I see a character play chess with Death in the middle of a plague, it looks like metaphor, it looks like a small prophecy.
POETRY
Biologists Test Promising Treatments for Hibernating Creatures
By Julia McDaniel
To hibernate, then, is only a way of delaying need, the need for need. The body going on with its fits of being.
POETRY
Statues
By Doug Ramspeck
Sometimes the old men held their fishing poles like divinations, and the tops of their heads were like grass turning pale and desiccated with winter, annulled by snow.
iPOEMS
IPOEMS
iPOEMS
iPOEMS
Narrative
By Madeleine Cravens
Obstacles must separate characters from their desires: this is called plot. The old woman wanted the fruit and the terrain of the village created a barrier.
IPOEMS
Sundials Are Sad Like That
By David Grubin
Sundials lie in the light. The shadow carves the hours while the Latin, long dead, inscribes.
iPOEMS
Long Run
By Richard Quigley
Hooves will beat across an American desert willing to dissolve itself. Your kindness, a heaviness I carry everywhere.
CARTOONS
CARTOONS
CARTOONS
CARTOONS
Cartoon Art Volume 2023-01
By Various Artists
New laughs with Shakespeare, before a judge, at bedtime, and with a blurry-eyed chef.
CARTOONS
Cartoon Art Volume 2023-02
By Various Artists
New laughs involving a princess, grandma, friends, a dog, and a turtle.
CARTOONS
Cartoon Art Volume 2023-03
By Various Artists
New laughs with a pair of rabbits, a grandfather’s big ideas, a co-worker’s advice, some good boys spreading the good news, and the promise of spring.