Our community was born out of curiosity and commitment.

Eye
Joshua Abush

Being an Edge-Creature
Sue Heatherington

Leaving
Gail Boenning

Bare Branches
Matthew Word Bain

Winter’s Gentle Kiss
Scott Gilbertson

Darkness and Light
Mary Ellen Bratu
Alchemy
Ajike Kendrick Asegun
I.
All that I’ve cultivated and tended to
all these years has come back
to serve me
All the word-food I’ve eaten in the past
twenty years has been digested
integrated and assimilated into
my astral marrow into
my bones blood skin hair nails teeth
ground into base spiritual substance
that comes through me like sorcery now
I still read write speak
make magic everyday
I mean a girl’s gotta eat, right

Let It In
Amanda Judd
See What You’ve Been Missing
Patrick McNerthney
You may be wondering if port cities come with seedy underbellies as implied by the 1980’s neon-splashed smash hit series Miami Vice (after which I’ve modeled most of my life).
They do.
The Usual Suspects, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Harry Potter – all take place in port cities. All reveal what goes on right underneath your nose but you’re too busy texting and fretting over your IG profile to notice.
For shame.
And not actually living in a port city is a lame excuse.
I would know about this. Ports. Seediness and the like. I was once a Maritime Courier.
I don’t put it on my resume out of fear of reprisal.
Maritime couriers service (you guessed it) Maritime Vessels which are fluvial or more generally waterborne transport for solid or liquid freight, specifically (in my case) things like grain, coal, rock, petroleum, heroin, truck-sized intermodal containers full of stuff we buy at Costco, and occasionally nuclear weapons.

View Over Keizersgracht
Anya Toomre

Dirty Dancing
Marijke van Veldhoven

Dear God
Jennifer Hole
Calculus of Cooking
Sana Fayyaz
Sweaty palms. Pencil slipping through my fingers. Thick air of uncertainty surrounds the room. Sounds of thirty pencils scribbling across crisp midterm papers. Time ticks away. Mr. Shapiro walks around the room, hands clasped behind him, through the rows of lined desks and chairs. He stays briefly a while looking over the shoulders of randomly selected students, taking a quick glance at their work. This only adds to the gravity as everyone quickly writes down their best solutions for the Intermediate Calculus Midterm exam. So much is at stake. A good score on this exam can mean ease on the final and a bad score means a series of worries for the remainder of the semester.

The Community of Salt
Inma J. Lopez
Coming to our daily work with our individual stories, our separate dreams, we started to notice synchronicity. We began to work in ways that encouraged its emergence.

The Pace of an Elephant
Kathy Karn

The Periodic Table of the Elephants
Tommy Gilboy

The Planets Are Having a Party
Renée Fishman

The Lost Coast
Nick Burdick
Even From Beyond
John Neil
First, he sold the chairs. The patinated pair with the buttons and embroidery. After that, the artwork. The Tintoretto he’d bought in Milan. The bronze statue of the Siren with the dove. The one he’d commissioned done. Eventually, he hired the kitchen emptied, the carriage sold, and the books sorted and donated to the city library.
Within the week, the house was empty. Only what he needed remained. The staff would gather the rest after he’d gone. It mattered little to him then.
That evening, he packed a bag—a single one, with everything he’d need.
When he’d finished, he came to the greatest task, the most difficult one. The one that, with each passing year, he’d considered and then abandoned. The thing he never truly wanted done.
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Herd Immunity
Manu Satsangi

Shall We Travel?
Xiuming Liang

Are You a Rebel?
Charlotte Cronquist

Know You Can Never Be Broken
Helena Roth

Once
Aaron Wolfson

All Aboard
Zigalet

Giraffe
Jayashree Krishnan

Episode 76 – Seth Godin: The Practice of Picking Yourself
Laura Tucker