Author: Qu Literary Magazine

Mama Marilyn! Look over here! No Mama! Not there, over here! I hear my children giggling as I follow their voices inducing me through the passageways of my childhood house. The pitted walls are painted magnolia-white and the white carnations Daddy bought are dry like tongues in a chipped, blue vase along the corridor cluttered…

You taught me the meaning of transgress, not the dictionary gloss but averted glances at the bar where we sat in our darkened corner sipping another black beer as if anti-miscegenation laws still hovered in the Southern air. You tweaked my learning curve later … [Click here to purchase a copy of the magazine]

Cool coffee, coagulated, the last few sips before third shift starts, tasting tobacco leaves in everything. Three packs a day, trying to hide her habit from her mom, whose grandson smells like he’s the one smoking. Monotonous factory line, tobacco bander for down market brands, not one smoked to celebrate a marriage or a new…

Grey glinting all around you, like the inside of a gun barrel illumined, how many steps will you pace in this greasy kitchen’s stacked circumference? How many tasks to pass the fullness of a day? In the hewing of tomatoes into flat wet wheels, in portioning hamburg like frankenstein fingerprinting brains, you become lost. You…