From "Exercise in Causality" by Alison Braid-Fernandez: "The window is broken up by rain. Moss grows greener in the seconds before lightning. Deluge leaves a screaming blue sky behind."

From "Here To Save You" by Genevieve Abravanel, CQR #41: "They gave the heart to a man named Jacob: middle-aged, white, ailing, dying. Ben had been thirty-six and in perfect health."

From "The Road To Mineral King" by Merrie Snell, CQR #41: "I thought I knew dust. Soon as you leave the towns California atomizes. Mica flecked and rattler skins unshook the ground we made driving up that heat—taste it— on the road to Mineral King." #poetry

from "Abduction" by Tim Raymond, CQR #41: "After twenty years of no contact, my brother, Lucas, called me last night to say, sorry, Jake, but he needed me back in Wyoming for a little while. His son, his boy, had gone missing."

From "Occlusion" by Christopher Nelson. CQR #41: "full moon risen in partial eclipse above silos and skeletal grain chutes— you watching as well all those states over texting its colors almost lemon...now it’s tomato red..."

From "Don't You Remember" by Julie Esther Fisher, CQR #41: "Just after dawn, she left the flat and advanced toward the mysterious purple light she saw in the distance. Her shaky gait was that of one restored to her feet after a long convalescence."

From "How To Shop For Groceries When Your Friend Is Dead" by Matthew Parris, CQR #41: "First, notice how the white fluorescent bulbs flatten everything, make the grocery store look colorless and dull. This is totally and completely normal."

From "Memory Artist by R. Craig Sautter, CQR #41: "I remember everything. Growing up, that was an advantage. As a young child, I lulled myself to sleep recounting the number of apples on the apple tree and those that had fallen to the ground in our back yard..."

From "Bee Dance" by Jeffrey Utzinger, CQR #41: "Everything about this plan seems like a bad idea. Installing a bee- hive inside my home requires a window entrance, which will establish a beeline waist high that intersects the path we take to tend the garden, chickens, and the duck."

From "Johnny Bonebrake & The Nightfish" by Christine Byrne, CQR #41: "we back the boat down the landing his father’s black chevy keyed 4 miles to empty his jeans wet to the knee Johnny tries the motor over & over..." #poetry

From "Of What I Felt" by Sarah Dunphy-Lelii, CQR #41: "In this little town on the west coast of Mexico where I flew to be away, I eat breakfast the first morning in the town square with eight sunburnt Americans and three dogs in neckerchiefs, listening to Billy Joel."

From "No One Needs Cheese On Thanksgiving" by Brian Ellis, CQR #41: "First day at Willy Wallas Food Market I was enrolled in Cheese University. The unspoken syllabus had one item: become well acquainted with what you are about to sell." #fiction

From "The Chord" by Marjorie Stelmach, CQR #41: "Early evening, in a light spring rain, a young composer strolls the gravel roadway leading to his studio. He will work into the night layering bits of world-sound beneath a nearly finished score—a fabric of shadow-tones..." #poetry

From "Little Pete" by Andrea McLaughlin, CQR #41: "Pete had been to a few sessions with a therapist who insisted on introducing him to the different parts of himself. There was Little Pete, Teenage Pete and Big Pete. Until recently they were all jumbled up in his mind."

From "Amortization" by Phillip Jones, CQR #41: "As we pull away from the drive-up window, my father hands me a damp, waxy cup with milkshake inside. I feel warm air blowing from the dashboard to defrost the windshield on a cold night of dribbling rain."

From "What You Remember" by Laura Rosenthal. CQR #41: "a place with an exotic name Far Rockaway sand and umbrellas as far as you can see and the ocean the grownups warn you the undertow could pull you down so fast you wouldn’t have time to scream for help..." #poetry

From "Where Is Thy Sting?" by Michael Pulley, CQR #41: "I’m certain it didn’t happen more than twice in my childhood, men hanging themselves in garages. But it seemed my mother would enter the kitchen and inform me at least biweekly, 'Mr. Morgan hung himself yesterday.'" #fiction

From "New Names In Monterey Park" by Mike Yunxuan Li, CQR #41: "Angela Wang, head researcher in the world-renowned UCLA chemistry program, fell out of character one day during her first trimester."

From "In Memory Of My Uncle" --who died helping to string a telephone line across a river in Ohio more than one hundred years ago By William Virgil Davis, CQR #41: "Because he was the best swimmer in the crew, there was no question who would enter the water." #poetry

From "Blue Topaz" by Jason Mazzotta, CQR #41: "The Perot/Stockdale ’92 sign from an election cycle and a half ago was still on display in the faded colonial’s attic window, and unkempt grass snuck up my jeans through the cracked cement walkway."

From "Ekphrasing Wener Herzog" Patty A. Gray, CQR #41: "I am currently watching every film that Werner Herzog has ever made, in the order in which he made them. I have been engaged in this marathon for a number of years..."

From "I Run Into My Daughter And Her Boyfriend In The Walgreens Parking Lot Holding A Prescription For Birth Control Bills" by Dawn Dupler, CQR #41: "and I thank God she’s on it. Twenty-one next week and last year she dated a girl. Back then, a friend joked I didn’t have to worry..." #poetry

From "The Chief Is Never Wrong" by Ian Randall Wilson, CQR #41: "When the squirrel was only about two stories above the ground, crouching on a setback that was an architectural detail of the lower floors to create shadow lines, the first reports of child separations at the border began coming in."

From "Health And Human Wellness" by Angela Pneuman, CQR #41: "In their new home, on another planet called Kentucky, in a green little town full of churches, Carlee’s mother, Monica, had started doing all the right things." #literaryfiction

From "The Birthday Party" by Aleks Zywicki, CQR #41: "the man was 40 & we had eaten & we were splitting up some of us to see the pink moon & some on a liquor run & right there dead in the heart of 5th avenue you put..." #poetry

From "Outside Of Denver, On The Train" by Tyler Rigdon, CQR #41: "I dreamt I was asleep on a raft, rocking in a cradle between the waves of some faraway maternal ocean, but I was in Denver."

From "Shelf Life" by Michael Milburn, CQR #41: "I keep a file of writing-related quotes, a kind of commonplace book, except that it lives in a Word document on my hard drive. There’s a separate folder with additional quotes elsewhere on my computer, but this is a greatest-hits compilation..."

From "Donna In The Kitchen" by Hugo S. Simões, CQR #41: "Donna sits in the kitchen in a robe of polar fleece, a large mug of tea brewing slowly before her. She is old, and would rather live on crackers and cheddar than toil at the stove."

From "The Passengers" by Nina Schuyler, CQR #41: "You’re lucky to be alive. That’s what her friends told her, and even her daughter called and asked if she was okay, and Polly knew she didn’t mean physically, but was a screw jangling in Polly’s brain because why had she picked up a male hitchhiker?"

From "Two Doubles" by Bryan D. Price, CQR #41: "I was in the backyard pruning the bougainvillea while I talked to my mother on the phone. She asked, What’s that sound, and I told her I was doing some yardwork. Must be nice, she said, Tom would love to get outside and do some work this time of day."

From "I'm Gone" by Sara Wallace, CQR #41: "I woke in a cold dark room upstairs, the house coming to life with the first warmth of morning— the scrape of the sugar bowl on the gouged wooden table, the smell of biscuits and coffee, the greasy perfume of grandma’s soggy bacon winnowing under the door—"

From "Attached" by Jessica Treadway, CQR #41: "I was the one who said we’d regret it if one of us didn’t stay home with the baby, at least for the first year. We both understood that by 'one of us,' I meant me. My job was the more replaceable, and less rewarding than Harold’s..."

From "Journal Pages" by Charles Hood, CQR #41: "I belong to the magpie school of poetics, which is to say I am not very smart or talented but I do know how to gather up shiny bits of language and store them for later."

From "The Pink Chair" by Micah Perks, CQR #41: "Upstate New York, summer, late eighties, an orange VW Bug putters between high cornfields over a twisty two-lane. The driver has short, stick-up, unnaturally blond hair, wears a ripped T-shirt, men’s boxers, pink plastic cat-eye glasses." #fiction

From "Council Rock" by David L. Updike, CQR #41: “So, what we need here is an unbaptism,” said Kurt Bardet, stroking an imaginary beard with his fingertips. Sean Mahon, seated beside him on the fallen tree trunk, scowled. “That’s not a real thing, Kurt.” “Is baptism a real thing, Sean?” #fiction

From "Selena" by Siamak Vossoughi, CQR #41: "Selena Lee was the most dependable part of my early years of education. From the day we started kindergarten, she moved through school like she understood perfectly well what we were all doing here." #fiction #literature

From "Mother's Day" by Dion O’Reilly, CQR #41: "The heron with a twisted wing haunts the field— tiny pterodactyl flown in through a time-hole." #poetry

From "Mr. Hundred Hands" by Shawn Andrew Mitchell, CQR #41: "Mr. Hundred Hands is building fifty birdhouses to attract fifty or more birdsongs to the branches and limbs of one tree." #fiction

From "A Dog's Life" by Yanan Wang, CQR #41: "I was twenty-four years old when my family had the conversation about reincarnating Dad. We were seated around the dinner table, my mother, my grandmother, and me, shoveling stir-fried pea shoots and braised pork belly into our mouths." #fiction

From "Walking Along The Point" by Jake Young, CQR 30th Anniversary Edition: "The lake is choppy today, and clear, blue-green waves crash against the concrete sea wall like bottles thrown against the ground." #poetry

From "Henriette's Trick" by Signe Ratcliff, ‪CQR 30th Anniversary Issue: "Mason sometimes pretended that Mom drove to the Hardee’s and spent the day eating hamburgers, instead of driving into Germantown, where she cut hair at the Klassy Kut..." #fiction @signeratcliff.bsky.social‬

From "Oddballs" by Peter Ferry, CQR 30th Anniversary Edition: "Even before she stepped off the plane from Dallas–Fort Worth, Ethel Long had made the decision to abandon all formality..." Ferry, a beloved friend of the CQR, passed away on Sept. 17, 2024. www.chopintheatre.com/event.php?id...

From "Chicken Man" by Elizabeth McKenzie, @elizabethmck.bsky.social CQR 30th Anniversary Edition: "The chicken man cleans like no one else. Got his beak in everything, a tornado of order, a machine with feathers, but mostly a friend."

From "West In The Mountains" by Chuck Kramer, CQR 30th Anniversary Edition: "I was in Starbucks on a dismal winter day and ran into Jill Shelton. 'Danny,' she said. 'You haven’t aged a bit.'" #literature #fiction

From "Vignettes" by Gary Houston, CQR 30th Anniversary Edition: "New to northern New Jersey, vaguely Presbyterian, Dad wasn’t particularly religious and when provoked rather irreligiously combative, yet 'for the kid’s sake' hell-bent to settle on some church somewhere."

From "Charlene In Xanadu" by John Blades, CQR 30th Anniversary Edition: "Only two ports into the cruise, Charlene was sick—dizzy, nauseated, and unable to take further advantage of the many all-you-can-eat international buffets, from Mandarin to German to Moroccan..."

From "2013 (Lydia Fanny Lupita) by Christina Drill, CQR 30th Anniversary Edition: "That was the year we moved in across from the Lydia Fanny Lupita hair salon, in a neighborhood of Chicago far from the lake."

From "So Many Promises And So Many Lies" by S. Afzal Haider, CQR 30th Anniversary Edition: "After four days and three nights in Paris, Joyce and Ved headed toward the sun-drenched south of France for four nights and three days. From the Gare de Lyon they boarded an afternoon train for Avignon."

From "Strawberry Field" by Jey Ley, CQR 30th Anniversary Issue. Jey is a visual artist and new writer in Gem City, Ohio. IG: @jeyleyjey

Announcing the release of our Spring 2025 issue!