A Study in Light and Longing Erin Slaughter   The first love of Sylvia Plath’s life was Vincent Van Gogh, the impressionist painter. Though he lived and died half a century and a continent away, she spent her teen years believing they were soulmates, tragically separated by space and time. She gazed out between the…

On Fullness Kari Treese I was reading about dark matter in Chandra’s Cosmos, by Wallace Tucker. I discovered the volume on a bookshelf in the Seattle Public Library. Chandra is a telescope. He is the most powerful X-ray telescope to ever plumb the depths of the universe. Here is what we know. Dark matter cannot…

Mom Speaks on What Sold at Auction Christina Holzhauser Old Ringer Washing Machine When I was in high school, I made alotta my clothes because I took Home-Ec, so I made stuff. Far as I know, they was hand me downs. I really don’t know where we got our clothes; we just had em. Mom…

Dying Is an Art Rachel Watts In Nike Sulway’s Dying in the First Person, protagonist Samuel meditates on the grammar of death. “There are words,” he says, “they are simple and plain enough, but the grammar of dying is difficult.” Is death “what has occurred, what occurs, what will occur, what is always occurring?” I…

I Didn’t Need a Weatherman Reg Darling   Part One In the spring of 1968, I briefly emerged from the semi-reclusive life of my freshman year to volunteer in Eugene McCarthy’s presidential primary campaign. Distributing campaign literature downtown the day after Martin Luther King’s assassination, I offered a flier to a middle-aged man who said,…