BEST OF THE NET 2023; Essay in THE BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS 2018;
(cited in BAE 2015, 2016, 2020, 2022); PUSHCART poetry finalist
By Ilan Mochari
Helena Rho’s debut memoir, American Seoul, has earned rave reviews, with Kirkus calling it “a poignant, personal, sometimes painful chronicle of self-awareness and understanding.” Two years before this astonishing debut, Helena’s essay “Becoming Korean” appeared in our pages. We recently interviewed Helena about the creative process behind American Seoul—and how the release of her book… Read more »
By Anjali Mitter Duva
Namrata Poddar writes fiction and nonfiction, serves as Interviews Editor for Kweli, and teaches literature and writing at UCLA. Her work has appeared in several publications including Poets & Writers, Literary Hub, Longreads, The Kenyon Review, and The Best Asian Short Stories. Her debut novel, Border Less, released in March 2022 from 7.13 Books, was… Read more »
By Ilan Mochari
The Queen of Queens by Jennifer Martelli Bordighera Press, 2022 79 pages In “Cisoria,” Jennifer Martelli writes: The finger rest and the finger ring: wings pivoting on the steel heart of a fat screw. My friend once asked me: don’t you think scissors kind of look like angels? if you open them? Outside, the… Read more »
By Barbara Siegel Carlson
Barbara Siegel Carlson: The title of your new poetry collection The Queen of Queens pays homage to Geraldine Ferraro, who in 1984 became the first female vice-presidential or presidential nominee representing a major party. At the time Ferraro lived in Queens, N.Y. A number of your poems feature her as an apparent role model as… Read more »
By Dzvinia Orlowsky
Dzvinia Orlowsky: It’s a pleasure having this opportunity to interview both of you for Solstice. Jeff, I’ve been a fan of your work for decades, and Meg, more recently, I’ve gotten to know and greatly admire yours. It’s said that you can’t judge a book by its cover. But much to your credit, in this… Read more »
By Jennifer Martelli
Between the Hours by Barbara Siegel Carlson Finishing Line Press, 2022 27 pages In “Without a Trace,” Barbara Siegel Carlson writes: Chekhov said nothing in this world is clear and believed the heart a wanderer, each of us making our way through one moment after another like phantoms…and though some of the detail is exquisite,… Read more »
By Richard Hoffman
Amid the pandemic, a poet and a musician came together to create a record. The musician is George Hennig, a Swiss guitarist, singer, and songwriter with several albums to his credit including First Snow, From Grey To Gold, Jewels In The Gutter, The Definition of Face, GHOSTS, and Of Piers & Repose. The poet, in… Read more »
By Robbie Gamble
I’m thrilled to present the winner of the Stephen Dunn Prize for 2022, “Polar Bear,” by Carol Hobbs, selected by our poetry judge for this issue, Tomás Q. Morín. He writes, “‘Polar Bear’ stopped me in my tracks. It slows down time to an achingly slow pace, the bear’s pace, which is to say the… Read more »
By Carol Hobbs
Her glassy muzzle beats back the salt squall to be here. She who in her time swallowed seal cub after seal cub, sets out from Iqaluit, sprints the Arctic platform from leeward ridge to longing, dividing sea from tundra. When pack-ice grows too thin, fishermen catch her like a ghost in the trawl. She rakes… Read more »
By Sarah Browning
While America is dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic, we in Black America are dealing with the 1619 pandemic. – Benjamin Crump, attorney for the family of Dijon Kizzee (1991-2020), killed by LA County police deputies, CNN, 9/23/20 Dijon Kizzee loved anything on wheels – bike, go-kart, motorcycle Family calls him Mama’s boy, broken by… Read more »
By Rasheena Fountain
I heard that It rained outside again; not that type of storm that you hear, loudly: the red reigning showers, burning pines—ap—peals, skies, a loose sieve Our tempest, long-winded— hourglass shards twisting time into silent sand mounds: Nightshades’ severe temperament Illy-oozing dystopic ether Malleable breaths betrayed Brick-and-mortar dust Yellow buzzers’ sundown I can’t breathe, We… Read more »
By Gerard Robledo
The relationship between a photograph and reality is complicated …complicated at best. – Errol Morris Offered up for discussion are two photos preserving a moment: one real, the other slightly less. When photography edged away from alchemy into science. The infamous firsts of war, an arranged image: hand-sized cannonballs like elephant shit riddling the… Read more »
By Suphil Lee Park
But there’s room for joy in the dark future growing wings. She believes this with resistance to life fading. [Believe this.] The war’s been long upon her. Is here to last. Is here to outlive the time few mattered more than passion. [The fruitless act of planting a seed in an open wound that won’t… Read more »
By Kate Allore
Waganakising, Land of the Crooked Tree. Calm is your color. Chartreuse kernels perch atop blades of Little Bluestem, they pirouette. Ancestors sing out with color soaked hymns; paint my heart with sadness, yet calm. Spotted Fawn explores the pristine waters of Wycamp Creek — bearin witness to the memory of ebony cloaked strangers, white around… Read more »
By Partridge Boswell
verb; untangle or unravel something; confuse or complicate (a question or situation); noun: a tangle, cluster or knot Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down. —Toni Morrison Here, it’s day. There, another sleepless vigil of a fraying burqa. By the time these billowy clouds reach the Hindu Kush,… Read more »
By Mary Buchinger
It was a book of manners she handed me a closed book I failed to open a book I could hit her with No never would even think to do that so deep inside those many pages words chewed-up digested ʌð The way of teeth those curved rows that meet and grind mother and child… Read more »
By Jed Myers
Down through a forested gouge in the earth, we took the trail under tall firs and cedars toward our secret lookout. We wanted to take in the distances over our inland sea. Off that water an icy wind infiltrated our slice of woods—old conifers shifted, moaned like live sirens. Ferns thrived on those moss-curtained towers—countless… Read more »
By Donna Spruijt-Metz
—after Psalm 105 lines 28-33 Flower-thin darkness came down around you, genius of things that fit into things—my ghost child fit fish into water, blood into fish, pale into blue. Flower-thin darkness came down around you, crowding things into your hungry heart until you crowded yourself out. Frictioning leafless and wild, flower-thin darkness came down… Read more »
By Tamako Takamatsu
When the waters have finally receded, night falls. None of them are used to such darkness (……………Obsidian……………) so black they cannot see their hands before their tear-stained faces. None of them have ever been without human light, without electrons, miraculously harnessed, without the power of the universe to obliterate ancient shadows. (……………The extraordinary dedication of… Read more »
By Nissa Valdez
in fifth grade I realized salvation wasn’t for me I didn’t think I’d make the cut and what did it really mean to be saved from something I’m not sure what and Catholic school had taught me all it really could plus my dad was about to be ordained a deacon and I figured that… Read more »
By Ewa Chrusciel and Barbara Siegel Carlson
What poems can one write after borders are brutally transgressed causing others, in turn, to cross to safety? To quote the Ukrainian poet, Kateryna Devdera in Ewa Chrusciel’s translation, “More than words, and orphaned poems, I desire to return to my motherland.” In times of war, one does not do verbal operations. One does not… Read more »
By Serhiy Zhadan, Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps
Translated from the Ukrainian by Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps *** You will never write about how it all really was. You won’t dare, you’ll keep it to yourself, put it aside, keep it in the dark. You’ll talk about literature, when you should talk about life, it’s life that rushes out into the… Read more »
By Jacques Viau Renaud and Ariel Francisco
Translated from the Spanish by Ariel Francisco Homeland Homeland from your starved latitude I felt my people rise through sonorous essences and heavy breaths. Homeland I felt how you grip through my blood squeezing my throat bruising my neck screaming along to my song. I witnessed your anguish from afar blooming in treetops erupting… Read more »
By Bożena Boba-Dyga, Kateryna Devdera and Ewa Chrusciel
Translated from the Polish by Ewa Chrusciel Leopolis semper fidelis Seemed like forever and ever Until Stalin stole it And now Putler bombs it You’ll see, you scum You will see Soot of Moscow, smoking ruins of your cities Polluted Forever cursed and dead There won’t be anybody left to rebuild When stone… Read more »
By Kateryna Devdera, Bożena Boba-Dyga and Ewa Chrusciel
Translated from the Ukrainian by Bożena Boba-Dyga and Ewa Chrusciel The biggest dream: to be with you all at Easter To gather for Easter. This Easter. Greetings, my family; what’s new, Mom? Mom is baking bread as always. My dear ones are all alive. My peace of mind quivers on a line. “My” dear… Read more »
By Richard Hoffman
Welcome to our Summer ’22 contest issue. First, I want to thank our judge, Alysia Abbott, author of the moving and memorable Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father, named a New York Times Editors’ Choice and one of the best books of 2013 by The San Francisco Chronicle. A vivid, heartrending work of sustained truth-telling,… Read more »
By Elisha Emerson
You held my eyes from the back of Advanced Studies of Dramatic Literature as if you were a tousled debauchee from an unrated foreign film, the kind with a sophisticated plot line, sure, but also plenty of straps, leather, and velvet. Years after our son’s autism diagnosis and days after your own, we sit at… Read more »
By Lynda Rushing
It’s morning and I am about to open the refrigerator when I see my mother squatting on the floor, shaking a thin line of white powder along the baseboards. Her face is furrowed in concentration, her forehead slicked with sweat. I’m ten, it’s the first day of summer vacation, 1967, and a long stretch of… Read more »
By Julia McKenzie Munemo
We sit in a line on a bench in Washington Square Park, my first son, me, my second son. Suitcases flank us—two of us are headed to the train station and on back home. One of us will stay here in the city of his birth. I can’t hear their voices because what I’m thinking… Read more »
By Lisa K. Buchanan
A former public-school teacher, she was fluent in multiple languages and said she had a graduate degree. Born into the post-war prosperity of the 1950s, she was raised in an upscale San Francisco neighborhood, three generations of her family in the same single-family Edwardian, recently valued at up to four-million dollars. Her father had been… Read more »
By Diana Tokaji
Pliny, the Elder, a Roman naturalist (AD 23-79), believed Borage, or Starflower, to be an anti-depressant, and it has long been thought to give courage and comfort to the heart. 20 Infusions 1. Suddenly I cannot imagine offering my arm. The German nurse with her V-neck whites, her fair hair and kind… Read more »
By Ashley Memory
The first day I ever heard the name Cody Lee Moffitt was in late January. I’d just finished a lunch of peanut butter and crackers when my phone beeped. A friend, Ray Kearns, had posted a note on our church’s message board. There’s a man on the loose who wrecked on Gopher Lane. Drug deal… Read more »
By Amory Rowe Salem
1. My father was twelve when he learned that his mother had kept a part of herself hidden. Five of them were standing at a Customs desk at Orly airport in Paris in 1957: my father, his older brother, his younger sister, their parents. The Customs officer held the family’s passports like a royal flush,… Read more »
By Anjali Mitter Duva and Lee Hope
Dear readers and friends of Solstice, We were thrilled with the number and quality of entries we received for this year’s fiction contest and heartened at how many young and emerging writers as well as established writers sent us their work. It was an honor to be entrusted with these fine stories. We thank our… Read more »
By Rayne Weinstein
In the mountains below Vladikavkaz, Johnny’s father splits bricks. One by one with a hammer. On the other side of the POW camp, the shards are shattered into gravel. The gravel is packed into crates, then sent in trains to be churned elsewhere into concrete. The concrete is then piped politely into bricks. The blue… Read more »
By Danny Leonard
“I am littoraly fucked,” I think, standing ankle deep in the Atlantic at low tide in a thick fog, not knowing which way shore lies. Not a time for word play perhaps, but I am not yet aware of the gravity of my plight. I am maybe a half a mile from… from what? From… Read more »
By Aaron Tillman
When my mom stood on her seat in front of the entire school and made a show of bowing at me after my performance, I swallowed back the urge to laugh. On some level, I knew she was performing as much from the audience as I was from the stage. I had put on an… Read more »
By Ian Lindsay
I think about the lies they tell in movies based on true stories. Well, this one ain’t like that—a lie. Wish it was. In Hialeah, people said the devil came up from hell, made Angelo do what he did. His Ina thought it was because of Angelo’s skin—the only other Filipino—darker than me with bigger… Read more »
By Christian Douglass
Robert and those who survive the following summer will ask themselves: Did that election season really happen when they were children? Are they re-writing the past to cut the pain? Then their collective trauma unclenches. That summer of romance and air conditioning happened, they assure each other, especially ones that fled North and gather at… Read more »
By Laura Krughoff
Alice clicks off the radio on her desk. Her now-silent office on the 12th floor of an Art Deco skyscraper on Dearborn is mercilessly air conditioned, but beyond the plate glass of her windows, she knows the city is sweltering through another white-skied August afternoon. She cannot listen to the news on public radio any… Read more »
By Andrai Whitted
This is the second year Solstice has offered a Graphic Lit (Comics) category as part of our Summer Contest. We enjoyed reading all the imaginative and wide-ranging stories and styles that came in from across the globe. Our judge, Josh Neufeld, ultimately selected “Horses” by Robert James Russell, a deeply personal piece about the author’s… Read more »
By William Betcher
“Ghosts: War Artifacts” – reinterprets historical photographic portraits to portray the emotions and damage of war. Using images from the American Civil War, I remove the metal mattes from the original 1860’s memorial cases to reveal the vivid patina of oxidation. I then print them as transparencies which are mounted on 24”x30” acrylic, reminiscent of… Read more »
By Quintin Collins
To measure humanity’s purpose in hunger and funerals, count divots in the bark of an oak tree. The voids collect raindrops, nestle the beetle and the worm. In the hollows that litter our peripheral vision, measure humanity as the depth of a stomach or the depth of a grave. I want to believe everything tossed… Read more »
By Quintin Collins
I try to reinvent you. A white gravestone in a field of white gravestones: I conjure this image instead of you. When you died, I was asked to write an elegy for the funeral. I didn’t know how to make you from the blank page, another cavity for the body you inhabited to fill. Even… Read more »
By Quintin Collins
after Airea D. Matthews because my parents liked a filmmaker or so I’m told pulp fiction means blood splatter spells marvin’s brain on the rear windshield means quentin tarantino my parents would spell Q-U-I-N-T-I-N their own magic transformation but still fits in mouths when teachers roll call or for job interviews but still quentins… Read more »
By MC Hyland
For Laura Henriksen & the Secret Feminist Book Club Months after Fiona Apple’s voice fills my apartment every day for weeks, I find one of her lines straying repeatedly into my head. I too used to want him to be proud of me / And then I just wanted him to make amends. It’s a… Read more »
By MC Hyland
Once, my time was valueless because I lived somewhere very cheap. After that, in a new town, I was unable to secure enough paid work, and my time remained untethered from cash economies. In the first town, I learned many small luxuries: seventy-five cent beers at the bar on weeknights; weeding at the organic farm… Read more »
By Keith Kopka
I’m beginning to equate God with nothing but the tedious stammer of Porky Pig’s bald body popped through the center of a bass drum, announcing the end of another Merry Melodies production. A vacuum where no one dies until they look down in midair. Years I’ve spent writing a sight gag for the failure of… Read more »
By Foolan Flopez
If you love the ducks, don’t feed them bread. If you’re brown af, don’t feed them tortillas. She didn’t teach me the second bit, but to be fair, she was like *maybe* seven. We don’t expect sevens to be smarter than us, but here she was, chasing down a clearly sad middle-aged man and his… Read more »
By Livia Meneghin
plums melt on linens washed just yesterday the stain is shaped like her face she thinks a fan moves the air but she has no desire to rise she cannot tell her daughter about her bed about her cold pillow & sweat- drenched sheets or how figs are the only food worth eating in august… Read more »
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