Waiting for Content

by Nancy Ford Dugan

They came in the night and took our values.

Someone (in the mailroom? from the cleaning service?) stripped all the plexiglass stands on each desk of the teal-blue sheet of paper that proudly listed all our corporate values.

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The Hero Wakes up in a White Room

by D.S. Maolalai

You’ve seen it before.
They say a lot of writers
begin
with something like it,
because they are looking
at starting
on a white page,
and I believe them,
because most writers
are nothing
if not suggestible.

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Childless

by Natalie Crick

I lost six children here in the wood.
Even now, I see
bright hair flashes in pools of sun;
babies’ hair.
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Thirty Years of Papa

by Kapena Landgraf

She touched nothing. Papa had died thirty years earlier, but Tutu refused to disturb what he left behind. His shirts still hung in the open closet—button-downs of light blues and whites pressed at the center with sharply ironed cuffs. Brown trousers, thick cotton and wool. Black shoes with silver buckles. Checkered neckties. Handkerchiefs tucked into the front pockets of blazers.

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Yukimitsu Monogatari

by John Gerard Fagan

Yukimitsu sat cross-legged by an unlit fire. The room was still except for a slither of light inching under the door. Tea bubbled somewhere out in the dark; the smell made his throat run and jutted him out of his dream-like daze. He coughed and his breath smoked. Longed for the days before he served at Court. Longed to hear her voice in the now silent rice fields.

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