It’s strange how many countries and futureshave receded from you like the tide and that you, once so restlesswill now have to stand still.I used to picture you on some Chinese mountain your hair brushing the sky’s blue domeor in some other sceneyou painted with stories of your travels:glittering cities, lantern-hung alleys.You direct my fingers…

Clarence Portis (1946-2013) was one of the greatest spellers ever to walk the halls of Exalted Wounds Catholic Elementary in north St. Louis. He was also one of the school’s first black students. Pale boys with razor knicks on the sides of their heads pushed him into lockers and called him things, while nuns looked away…

On Believing the Night Has an End When the Night Has No EndThe quarterback spits in his shoe and believes therefore he’ll win today. In this story I am the believing, though once I thought I was the shoe; I thought my father was the spit; I thought the quarterback was very bearded and flanked…

July 3rd on a thin strip of land in Arizona; I remember how I’d leaned in to kiss you on the right side of our bed. Your absence was heavy. Savage. But I felt your presence in the atmosphere so I traced back the covers. (You loved violence and science.)And as I re-awoke I wandered to…

The last day of my parents’ marriage, my mother’s lover elbowed my father in the mouth. This lover had been my dad’s best friend growing up, the boy next door. He followed my parents to Indiana when the steel mill in our Downriver Detroit neighborhood closed. They let him sleep in the basement of our small…

Breath & Shadow is a quarterly journal of disability culture and literature. A project of AbilityMaine, Breath & Shadow is the only online literary journal with a focus on disability. It is also unique in being the sole cross-disability literature and culture magazine written and edited entirely by people with disabilities. While some literary journals may devote…

Thank you Thank you for your service Thank you for going Thank you for coming back Thank you for not dying Thank you for taking the bullet, the mortar round, the shrapnel that is making its way to your heart by micromillimeters every year Thank you for eating that god-awful food gritted with sand so we…

The place where I live is about to disappear. The Outer Banks will soon be sandwiched between the seashores of Morocco and North Carolina, squashed between larger landmasses. Seven days before the collision, the newscasters say, although they, along with the scientists they consult, can tell us nothing about the phenomenon. Like us, they wonder why…

Bob Sanders stood in his living room, shoulders squared to the wall upon which hung the third 32” flat screen Smart® TV Bob had owned in two years. Bob held a Wiffle bat, its knob pointed at Bob’s belly button, tip at his reflection in the powered-off screen.“Bob, I swear to God, if you break…

At first it is no more than a curiosity satisfied. The fleshiness of verdigris: sour, like licking blood. The new-grass bite of funicular. The prickle of a full-stop.But the boy Edward soon becomes ravenous. Schoolbooks prove reliable, if uninspired, sources. Those from the daily paper, once his father is done with it, tend to be a little dry-mouthed,…

When my parents divorced in the late 70s, I was an only child. But during the 80s—that legendary decade of excess—and through a complicated string of remarriages, I accrued a grand total of twelve stepsiblings. When I explain this to people in my generation, they often say, Oh yeah, just like the Brady Bunch.At which point I…