From "Love In The Time Of Bots [from The God Machine (in progress)]," by Umberto Tosi, CQR #42:
"My stomach swerves with the ambulance, siren yowling. The steering wheel has a mind of its own. No sense my white-knuckling it. I try to focus on this being the final run of a long day with Bot Geoff."
From "Snow In July" by Kimberly Ann Priest, CQR #42:
"I was two years old you tell me in a text, Dad,
and the randomness of your communication
about our camping trip in Iron County in 1979,
makes me worry because you are getting old now"
From "Letter Of Complaint To My Grandmother's Mortician" by Guava Yun, CQR #42:
"There are very few things I am certain of in this world after my grandmother’s death, but this I can say with confidence: you should not be doing anyone’s makeup."
From "Thirteen Ways Of Looking At Cinderella" by Alison Stone, CQR #42:
"1. The Devil makes work for idle hands. Therefore, Cinderella is holy.
2. This holiness resembles oppression."
From "Sumpthin" by Stephen Pett, CQR #42:
"On a late-May Saturday morning at Prairie Dream Kennels outside Faribault, a new arrival, an eleven-month-old breeder, a champion-pedigreed brindle boxer female in her first heat, tail and ears intact, is coaxed with Milk-Bones..."
From "Owwwwww Mnn" by Paula C. Brancato, CQR #42:
"Every day I ask my assistant Jiani to buy tissues and cashews.
Every day Jiani says she will but every day something
else happens and no tissues and cashews appear.
Buying tissues and cashews means..."
From "The Family Queer" by Beverly Burch, CQR #42:
"My mother would have liked a daring life, but she wanted home, family, more. Raised in South Carolina and Georgia, she moved to Florida to teach school and live at the beach."
From "Mother Tongue" by Deborrah Corr, CQR #42:
"My mother was Arkansas in our small Oregon town.
Arkansas in how she washed the clothes, the way
she worked the soil. Arkansas in her voice,
in the food she put on the table." #poetry
From "Psychopomp" by Shelby Kinney-Lang, CQE #42:
"No matter how many times I’ve asked her to say again what happened that evening, to tell me precisely, it’s like she fades a little, becomes not quite real, though I have no reason to doubt my mother has done what she says she has done."
From "West Elk Creek" by Alyse Carlson, CQR #42:
"The fishing isn’t as good now, my parents say
as fifty years ago, the willows too thick
for a back-cast to arc in the sky
the turquoise pools too shallow for the Big One..." #poetry
From "The Venice of Brooklyn" by Marie Scarles, CQR #42:
"My husband and I rented our Gowanus apartment in large part for its light. Our south-facing unit sits at the top of a four-story building in a low-rise industrial area, so the sky is visible from every window: north, east, and south."
From "Mom" by Hee-June Choi, CQR 42
"Mom stepped off the plane in San Francisco,
a letter strung around her neck:
my contact information, her diagnosis.
The cabin crew said she’d speak only in Japanese–
her one foreign language. My three kids greeted her
with 'Hello Grandma' in broken Korean."
From "Porcelain Bunnies" by Taylor Cook, CQR #42:
"No warning, just a sharp pain and then I’m pissing my lunch through my own ass. I can feel the foulness escaping my shorts, ruining them. It gets worse. The smell. A criminally sour and putrid funk that belongs to me."
From "The Body Is Ink In The Earth" by Malina Infante, CQR #42:
"and in ukrainian tradition the soul stays / near the body for three
days / my grandfather / orthodox and catholic / wasn’t cremated
until after / the funeral / after the wake / open casket / six days after
his death / just in case /"
From "Time To Go" by Nandini Bhattacharya, CQR #42:
"Shonali turned forty. Her relatives considered her spinsterhood set in stone. Then, a few days after her birthday, Shonali got an unexpected call from her cousin Piya’s husband, Shubhash."
From "The Bike, The Branch, And The Tick" by Gary Pedler, CQR #42:
"One matter I turned over in my mind was whether a connection existed among three apparently disparate things: the bike, the branch, and the tick."
From "My Grandmother Comes Back To Tell Me" by Sara Blazevic, CQR #42:
"I am trying to translate. We are
filling out forms at the doctor’s together
She has a cough. She is back from somewhere,
keeps saying everyone says she looks old, is
wearing a big coat." #poetry
From "The School Of Anecdotal Medicine" by Jacob M. Appel, CQR #42:
"...—desperate times being the breeding grounds of quackery— I found myself one forlorn autumn afternoon in the office of Dr. A. B. Majesterio of the School of Anecdotal Medicine." #fiction
From "Dead And Buried" by Soo J. Hong, CQR #42:
"Willow Rosen, the first, last, and only white girl Liza’s brother dated, was shot in the stomach on the way home from her after-school job." #fiction
From "Light Leaves" by Jeffery Allen Tobin, CQR #42:
"The barn door swings loose in the evening wind,
hinges creaking like something alive,
like something remembering the weight of hands,
the press of footsteps soft as dust."
From "Worry Journal" by Benjamin Niespodziany, CQR #42:
"Last night, when going over our worries,
I wrote down much more than you."
#poetry
From "Native Speaker" by Bruce Benway, CQR #42:
"For a brief time in graduate school I worked for a gentleman from the other side of the world who was writing a book on American English idioms."
From "Accommodation" by Allisa Cherry, CQr #42:
"As a teenager, you spend
a season in the fields
plucking mating grasshoppers
off of alfalfa stalks
and crushing them under your boot
for a dollar-fifty an hour." #poetry
From "Gower Gulch" by Lou Mathews, CQR #42:
"I like the power breakfast at Denny’s. About two in the afternoon, when the heavy hitters are gone and it’s just me and the philosophers."
From "The Artist's Arm," Valerie Hegarty, CQR #42:
"The artist residency was notable in creative circles for many things: the cabins in the sprawling acreage of meadow and woodland, the solitude and privacy afforded by the landscape, the uninterrupted long hours each day for a creative deep dive..."
From "Pinto Beans" by Aaron Brown, CQR #42:
"Days free from ICE detention, he wants to get barbecue (halal, of course) so we split a tray of turkey, beef, street corn, and pinto beans— a feast quickly divided across butcher paper, meat smearing grease..."
From "Trillium" by Josh McColough. CQR #42:
"Every spring and fall, I find myself in the presence of ghosts. They sit low, slouching—tired and uncomfortable—in hard plastic-armed desks, heads down, eyes lost in tiny screens."
From "The Richest Kid In The World," Olga Zilberbourg, CQR #42:
"I was stuck at home for the second week in a row. I had what I always had, bronchitis. My breathing was back to normal, mostly, and I was so well rested that I started waking up at the crack of dawn to read before going back to sleep."
From "My American In Paris: Diaries, Comments And A Story About A Fateful Meeting At A Paris Café," by Renate Stendhal, CQR 41: "It so happened that we loved the same café. I lived a short bike ride away; Kim needed a home base when she visited Paris."
Thank you @chicagoqreview.bsky.social and @elizabethmck.bsky.social for giving “Dead and Buried” the most wonderful home.
Fall ‘25 issue is amazing. Pick up yours today! (chicagoquarterlyreview.com)
#writingcomminity
#storysky
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