By Martha Park

In Memphis, passing a motel turned into a museum, or a deserted house circled with caution tape, or a trash-littered park with its monuments to Confederate generals, I felt called to be responsible for that place and the healing it wanted. In Roanoke, I have taken advantage of my ignorance. There are stories I do not know yet. I move through town unburdened.

By Molly Priddy

If I could pinpoint when the despair set in, the crushing feeling of fear and self-pity mixed together, it would have been when the taillights of the farm truck, which had been my guide for the last 20 minutes, slipped away, further into the blizzard than I could see, leaving me alone in a bubble my headlights created in the blowing snow.

Fiction by Laura Citino

When she is on top of him, gouging and slapping and doing whatever else he asks for, she feels as if she is shoving aside piles of cool dark earth. Digging through the layers of his body. She never strikes bottom. There is always more, like trying to make a hole in water. She wakes up close to dawn and he is unreachable in his sleep. She presses her thumb into the softness under his ribs. She wants to bury herself up to her elbows, to feel for that place where you can't divide anymore.

By Danielle Davis

Lap dances pay for gas as we weave through the dirty underbelly of the States. If Henry Miller were alive today—and a stripper—this is how he would have done things.