Essay: Pride

November 12, 2025.Reading time 19 minutes.

By R.M. Harper

I smoothed the dress across my chest as the Pride Parade smiled, danced, and sang its way past San Francisco City Hall. It was the kind of summer day the world paints the Bay: seventy degrees, a kissing breeze, and not a cloud in sight. Parents carried children on their shoulders to watch the floats pass by. Would it be easier for them, knowing what they could be, or are we moving backwards through the decadence of our time?

Violet cheered the Chicanx parade group passing twirling, smiling, holding hands. Her outfit alternated pink-black, nails and denim skirt, fishnets, scales of silver eyeshadow, six-foot-two, a neon angel in combat boots. We were in the MFA program together at Saint Mary’s College, in East Bay. She was a good friend and a great Dungeon Master. I was glad she had offered to come with me: it was my first Pride.

Entering the Civic Center I took in the panorama pink and plural. There were booths all along the Civic Center selling stickers, candy, cock rings, clothes. The crowd was making its way toward the main stage where drag queens smiled scarlet to the heartbeat drum of the stereo bass. A masc voice called out to us as we passed by.

Butter

June 1, 2025.Reading time 41 minutes.

By Meghan Chou

Featured Art: Stephen Reichert, Untitled, 2014. Oil on canvas, 12″ x 12″. “Cirlce” series.

I first saw her aboard the JADE PRINCESS, a cruise ship several miles off the coast of New Hampshire. She wore ribbons in her hair and a leather choker around her neck that read GIVE ME A REASON. The two of us made up the entire wedding party. I played the roles of daughter and maid of honor and she, her father’s best man. The other guests were staff on their dinner break and a couple gamblers, vying for a seat at the blackjack table.

The captain kept the ceremony short (on autopilot like his ship). Ma had already been married twice, yet for Husband #3, she still felt giddy and hopeful. Where I saw folding chairs and a wrinkled backdrop, she saw romance. Where I saw a cardboard cutout of her last boyfriend, she saw the love of her life. When the time came to exchange vows, I handed Ma the wedding band for her five-second fiancé, a mood ring from LOST & FOUND that glowed black in my sweaty hands. The best man gave her father a light-up jelly ring and our parents sealed it all with a kiss.

“Faye,” she introduced herself at the reception, my stepsister before I learned her name.

“Lenny.”

Essay: Taxonomy of the Self

June 1, 2025.Reading time 22 minutes.

By Maya Friedman

“When you’re with other people, your mind isn’t your own,” she once
said, and although she was talking about perception, and connecting to
the realm of feeling, I think about language too. Can you be alone with
language? What a dream that would be, what a nightmare.”

• T. Fleischmann, from Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through

The scene: several white canopies on the grass at night, alternating between downpour and dripping, a crowd bunched up to the edges of the covering and gathered beneath its own white breath.

I had to write my pronouns down on a white name tag, sticky and big as a brick. The event: “Queers in the Outdoors,” an opportunity for Portland’s sporty gays to find friends with which to hike, ski, camp, and maybe kiss. I was there to test the solubility of my queerness under the guise of finding people to carpool to the mountain with. I panic- ordered a bitter beer at the bar, stuttered a delayed thank you to the bartender who complimented my shirt, and wondered if the veteran queers could smell my fear, uncertainty, and lack of experience. I was there to see if someone could see me within the bi, asexual, gender-questioning maelstrom that consumes me whenever I have to introduce myself.

Flying into Darkness

December 2, 2024.Reading time 36 minutes.

By Mary Cross

Featured Art by Jordyn Roderick

Sometimes in the middle of the summer when it was so hot that the tar on the road stuck, like Juicy Fruit gum, to the bottom of my tennis shoes, I’d see a mirage in front of me and think of my grandmother—imagine her a painting. She loved the heat in the summer, and she told me that she even chewed a hunk of tar when she was a little girl. I’d imagine her head was a wide stripe of white across a green-colored canvas, and her hips were shimmering shades of red and caramel; but the craziest of all were her lips—they were yellow buttons, the same kind on my spring coat. At night in our room we shared, I’d think of this painting when I’d watch her remove her Junior Petite coffee-colored stockings, rub her shins with the clinical expertise of a practiced masseuse at the Y, then rest her feet in a bucket of Epsom salts, while I studied the gap between my front teeth with her compact mirror. She’d repeat the story about her sixteen-year-old daughter who died; “Molly, there is nothing worse than losing a child.” She kept a lock of her daughter’s hair in the second drawer of her dresser, along with fortunes from Ray’s Chinese takeout. On the night table, her top teeth sat in a jelly jar painted with the outline of Fred Flintstone. Without her dentures, she sounded as if her tongue were swollen.

Flights

November 24, 2024.Reading time 34 minutes.

By Jill Schepmann

Featured Art: “Spring Returns and So Do I” by Leo Arkus

I walk out of class, my mis-spoken and fragmented explanations of the day racing. A greatest hits of my unworthiness as a teacher. I think of earlier in the day, walking around the lake with a friend. The building I’ve just left is called Lone Mountain, which stands on a hill, in a city of hills, dramatic, grand. And I trick myself again into believing that I belong here. Sometimes, Lone Mountain makes me witness the fog coming off the Pacific to swallow San Francisco’s avenues. Sometimes, the glass buildings downtown. Once, on a rainy, windy day, I looked out my classroom window to see two giant cypress trees grown as one split and fall away from each other, their branches pointed skyward until they came to rest in sudden-found angles, fossilized insects on their backs.

As I descend the mountain, I think of going home to my new girlfriend in Oakland. Oakland is also new to me. Susannah is making pasta for us. This caretaking, too, is new. I walk a little quicker thinking of the way she comes to unlock the door when I’m too long finding my keys. Her warm lips. Cupping her elbow in my palm. Her cheek resting against mine. I quicken. I quicken.

My Body is a Cemetery

July 17, 2024.Reading time 53 minutes.

By Eliza Sullivan

In the shower, she moves my head under the water. Rinses the shampoo out and untangles the knots. An ant crawls out of the pink linoleum.

She’s cold, her wet chest pushes against my back. Her knees against the backs of mine. She’s always trying to talk about it.

Have you ever tried talking to anyone? she asked at dinner.

Is there anything I can do for you? she whispered in the theater.

I love you, she says, every day. I love you, do you know that?

And then she’s kissing me but he’s at the other end of the tub. Hairy legs spread. You’re supposed to hold your breath when you drive by cemeteries or lock your doors or something so you don’t invite ghosts and I don’t have a great relationship with my mother who gave me that advice but I can’t breathe.

She sees him too. Gently, she moves me away and back under the water. She sighs.

Sweater Weather

November 21, 2023.Reading time 9 minutes.

By Cara Lynn Albert

The Featured Art is “The Illusion of Memory” by Greta Delapp

You drive to Cassadaga not because you really believe in psychics and spiritualists, but because you’re thirty-eight and feel like you’re running out of options. Because it’s January fourth and you just spent another holiday season alone while your family asks about the absent husband.

The was-never-present in-the-first-place husband. The would-rather-fuck-the-eighteen-year-old-dog-walker husband.

He’s been gone for two years, and good riddance. You pull a cashmere cardigan over your shoulders, a Christmas present from your aunt bought half-off at JCPenney, because it’s one of the few days out of the year where Central Florida dips below sixty degrees. Angels and bloated polar bears dance over crabgrass-infested lawns. Plastic icicles hang from gutters, though it hasn’t fallen under freezing here in three decades.

Praying I Wouldn’t Be Last

November 12, 2023.Reading time 34 minutes.

By Maya Afilalo

The Featured Art is “Blossoming” by Greta Delapp

The summer after ninth grade, I had my first kiss. All school year, I’d been on a mission to no longer be “prude”—the kissing equivalent of a virgin. It seemed other girls were always talking about their conquests. Who they had kissed, and where, and whether the boys felt them up over or under the bra. I longed to be part of these conversations, to offer my own tale of triumph, to sagely weigh in on others’ dilemmas. Instead, I stood to the side, quiet, fiddling with my razr flip phone. That summer was the Summer of Death: Michael Jackson, Walter Cronkite, Farrah Fawcett, Billy Mays. Others, whose names I didn’t recognize. I was fourteen years old, and death was no deterrent to my desire.

I wondered if my lack of suitors had something to do with my appearance. Through middle school, I had sported frizzy curls cropped into an unfortunate bob. Every day, I wore a Life is Good T-shirt or a hoodie or both. Adidas track pants. I had what my well-intentioned cousin once called “only a little bit of a mustache.” When high school started, I made an effort. I traded my swishy pants for jeans, my shapeless T-shirts for fitted tops from Old Navy. I got my ears pierced. I kept the bob, though I began styling it with John Frieda mousse that came in a tall silver can. It was my cousin who showed me how to apply the mousse. He was my age, also curly-haired, had been kissing girls for years.

Costumes

February 19, 2023.Reading time 56 minutes.

By Carlee Jensen

Featured Art: Paralyzed by Abby Pennington

It was Halloween, and all the ladies from the front office had dressed as Wonder Woman. I spotted them as I crossed the parking lot: in matching red go-go boots and lamé headbands, tight Lycra dresses that framed their tits in gold. There was something dazzling about the sight of them, standing shoulder-to-shoulder at the head of the carpool line, tiny skirts ruffling in the October breeze.

“It’s quite a spectacle,” said Claudia Palmer, surveying the scene while she waited for me to swipe my key card at the front door. Claudia was too dignified for costumes, but like all teachers of a certain generation, she owned a vast collection of appliqué vests and novelty jewelry, which she trotted out for special occasions to the delight of her fourth-graders. As she waddled through the door, burdened by her many tote bags, I admired the twin kernels of candy corn hanging from her ears and the gap-toothed jack-o’-lantern brooch perched at the apex of her ample chest.

“I’m glad they’re confident,” she went on. “Even Mrs. Ward, at her age. But is this really the example we want to set for our young women? Your outfit seems much more appropriate, Valerie.”

I was a cat. I had been a cat every Halloween of my teaching career, with the same fuzzy ears from the grocery store seasonal aisle and the same greasy whiskers drawn in eyeliner on my cheeks. A hole had opened in the armpit of my overextended black T-shirt, revealing stipules of untended hair whenever I raised my arm. I liked Claudia—she was the kind of teacher I could imagine myself becoming in a few decades, an old-school bitch who inspired devotion in the students she tortured with handwriting practice and multiplication quizzes—but it seemed awfully rich to suggest that I was any kind of example.

Still, she wasn’t the kind of person you contradict. “It is a bit on the nose,” I admitted, gesturing through the window at Mrs. Ward. She was hamming it up, striking Lynda Carter poses for the approaching cars. “Like, I’m a teacher! What’s your superpower?”

Lonely, Lucky, Brave

May 3, 2022.Reading time 44 minutes.

By Jillian Jackson

When I hit on the scratch ticket I was at Castle Island with Hannah. We used to go there every Friday. After Hannah finished walking dogs and I finished up my shift at the café, we liked to pack a lunch and watch the planes flying into Logan airport. We always ate turkey sandwiches that I stole from the café and drank wine out of cans. We finished a family-sized bag of salt and vinegar chips.

That afternoon Hannah was wearing my favorite cardigan, a Good Will find, pink and covered in sparkles. She had on pink lipstick that had smudged a little bit on her bottom lip. We were watching the planes, our bare feet in the cold sand. It was April and we were glad we could sit there without our jackets on, even though we were a little cold when the wind picked up.

“It’s time,” Hannah said. She reached into her bag and dug out the tickets. She dealt them like cards at a poker match, back and forth, one and one. All ten.

Love, Dungeons, Magic, Dragons or Some Combination Thereof Will Save This Marriage

November 29, 2021.Reading time 52 minutes.

By Marvin Shackelford

Featured Image: Power Shots by Sam Warren

My finest moment, the occasion that defines me as a person. Okay. You have to imagine the cliffs. Sheer and bleached in the light of a moon or two and rising from the foam of a screaming ocean. The sky is bleeding down in a magical haze, and a horde of monstrous creatures roars nearer. That happens all the time. This isn’t metaphor. They’re armed and armored and charging from the landward side, and the petulant face of a dead god breaks open out over the waters. His teeth drip with death and his eyes are storms, literal lightning and thunder and hailstones, bearing down on where I stand at the edge of the world. He’s starting to take physical form. He’s getting real. I’m the focal point of the material plane for once in my miserable life, and I thrust the crystal, that plain-looking clear-color gemstone pulled unwittingly from a dragon’s trove, I drive it straight into my heart. Breastplate undone and hair flinging in the wind and my lover wailing as I drop into his arms. Our enemy screams and begins to fade. I’ve saved the world.

Mr. Cosmos

November 29, 2021.Reading time 37 minutes.

By Jill Christman

“It matters not who you love, where you love, why you love, when you love or how you love, it matters only that you love.”

~ John Lennon

This morning I made a single-cup drip coffee and poured too much water through the small yellow cone. When I lifted the cone to peek, strong, black coffee filled my white mug to the brim.

Nay, not the brim, I thought. Past the brim. I hung onto the edge of the counter and brought my eyes down level with the top of the mug, marveling at the way in which the coffee arched up out of the mug, a bitter mountain, the strength the surface tension pulling the coffee molecules beyond what seems possible. I would like to die on a coffee mountain, I thought, straightening my legs. I hadn’t yet had even a sip. Maybe it was time. The house was so quiet I could hear the muted ticking of the wall clock in the kitchen, thumping her plastic hands around inside her plastic face, bearing witness to the wonder of the coffee rising up and out of the mug, ticking off the seconds of our lives.

This is when I heard another voice in my head. Mr. Cosmos, my fifth-grade science

teacher at the round school in Newbury, Massachusetts circa 1980. He’d given us all big cups full of water and little cups full of nothing and told us to pour water into our little cups until our cups runneth over. That’s the way Mr. Cosmos talked. Children, he’d say as if we were attending boarding school in mid-century England, Children, are you ready? Pour. Pour your water. Pour your water out—and let your cups runneth over.

The Names You Choose

November 15, 2020.Reading time 55 minutes.

By Nicole VanderLinden
Winner, New Ohio Review Fiction Contest: selected by Lauren Groff

Featured Art: Beach Scene by James Hamilton

Vanessa had wanted the luau, something extravagant—never mind that we were a moon away from our original budget. But that was Vanessa, always doubling down. She swam in mountain lakes; she was the only person I knew who’d been arrested for playing chicken. “We’re in Maui,” she said, letting geography make its case. “It’d be fun for the kids.”

This wasn’t all true, because our youngest, Chloe, dreamed of puréed bananas. She was barely a toddler. She’d never tasted salt, and bubble baths made her shriek. It was the other kid my wife had been alluding to, the child of our concern, our Anna.

Vanessa bought tickets to the luau. I was suggestible—there were so many things I was trying to save then, money the least precious among them. We returned to the cool of our room by three so we could shower and put calamine lotion on our burns, our sun-chapped faces. Vanessa took Chloe with her and got dressed in the bathroom, where she’d laid out various makeup cases and where the tub had jets, and I waited for Anna, who was twelve and who, when she was ready, spun for me in a white sundress lined in eyelet lace.

At the luau, we inched toward the entrance on the resort grounds, entertainers beating drums and offering drinks made with canned pineapple juice. Chloe sat on her mother’s hip with her wild, straight-up ponytail and gave everyone her skeptical face, the one that prefaced an opinion you couldn’t predict. “Drum,” she said seriously, as if naming objects for the first time. “Drink.” Anna had put on a dark hoodie, though it was still hot, and shuffled ahead of us all.

There Will Be Salvation Yet

November 6, 2020.Reading time 24 minutes.

By Tania De Rozario
Winner, New Ohio Review Nonfiction Contest: selected by Ira Sukrungruang

Featured Art: The Last Supper By H. Siddons Mowbray

1993. That’s when it happens. Two months after your twelfth birthday. It’s a sweaty afternoon. This day which blisters with possibility. This day you learn that there are demons inside of you.

You’re on your way home from school. You know something is wrong the minute you get off the bus. Your mother waits at the bus stop, teary-eyed. Your relationship has grown monosyllabic, but the tears feel like a warning, so you ask.

What’s wrong?

It is when she smiles that something inside you unravels. You realize hers are happy tears. But her smile is vacant. Placid. A Stepford Wives smile. The tears fall but there is nothing behind them. She’s a mannequin crying on command. A talking-doll with electronics scrambled.

You don’t have the language for this yet.

She grabs you, holds you tight: Nana has been saved!