Tahoma Literary Review, Issue 28

Tahoma Literary Review, Issue 29

This piece was written early on during the pandemic, when I was trying to come to terms with the apparent capri-
ciousness of life. I’ve been a fan of the Stoics for years, so I’ve often meditated on the notion that we have no control over anything outside of ourselves, but one day I was struck with a memory of my grandfather convincing me that I could make clouds disappear. It was a balm for me. There were days during the lockdown when I truly needed to remember that feeling of control. I’m so grateful to my grandfather for this memory.

Joanna Manning (she/her) is a Pennsylvania native who now calls the Pacific Northwest home. Find her—and some creative inspiration—at jlmanning.com

Joanna Manning, Let It Go, flash nonfiction

I’m hardly the first to observe that writing fiction about climate change poses some unique challenges. On the one hand, there’s the risk of writing mere disaster porn; on the other hand, the scale of the crisis has a way of exploding the usual loci of meaning, making dramas of the human psyche feel trifling, even indulgent. “What We Yield” is my attempt to split the difference. If rising seas, mass extinction, and billions of climate refugees risk exceeding our emotional grasp, surely a hike in the price of coffee can still command our attention.

Tom Gammarino (he/him) is author of the novels King of the Worlds and Big in Japan, and the novella Jellyfish Dreams. Shorter works have appeared in American Short Fiction, The Writer, Bamboo Ridge, Entropy, The New York Review of Science Fiction, The New York Tyrant, and The Hawai'i Review, among others. He has received a Fulbright fellowship in creative writing and the Elliot Cades Award for Literature, Hawai'i’s highest literary honor.

Tom Gammarino, What We Yield, flash fiction

This poem was initially modeled after Louise Glück’s long-lined, more narrative poems in her 2009 book A Village Life. I had also recently moved to Oregon for graduate school and was in the process of coming out, so concepts of change and transformation were on my mind. Adolescence is a strange liminal stage of development, and I often felt so different from my peers at that age. As a reserved, sometimes awkward, creative boy, I think I resonated with butterflies and their journey from humble caterpillar to something delicate and winged.

Phillip Watts Brown (he/him) lives with his husband in northern Utah where he works at an art museum and writes poems during lunchbreaks. You can find his work at phillipwattsbrown.com.
Photo credit: Andrés Larios Brown

Phillip Watts Brown, Metamorphosis, poetry

I started writing this essay in 2019 after a vacation in Iceland. Despite five attempts, I couldn't get it to work. I knew I had to do something different, but I wasn't sure what. In a moment between frustration and desperation, I numbered all the sections, cut them into individual strips, tossed them into the air, and re-assembled the pieces as they fell, at random with very little changes to the order. It turns out, breaking up the chronology set the essay free.

Gabriela Denise Frank is a Pacific Northwest writer, editor, and creative writing instructor. She is the author of Pity She Didn’t Stay ‘Til the End, a prose chapbook from Bottlecap Press (February 2022). 
Website: gabrieladenisefrank.com
Instagram and Twitter: @CivitaVeritas 
Photo credit: Megan Mishra

Gabriela Denise Frank, The Ice Cave, nonfiction

This poem contrasts the tender wedding photos that hang in my parents home where there is still bare plaster from holes my mother made in the walls. 
Photo credit: Em Dial

Cassandra Myers (they/she/he) is a South-Asian-Italian, queer, disabled, non-binary poet and social worker located in Toronto, Ontario, with a fixation on maximalism and the sublime.

Cassandra Myers, Wedding Portrait of My Parents Before, poetry

When I was in high school, I started writing a piece about suicide that I quickly abandoned—it just made me too uncomfortable. Since then, I’ve had several very close  relationships with people struggling with depression. It’s a dynamic I’ve had a hard time grappling with, and one I wanted to try writing about, so I salvaged a small part of that high school piece for this story.

Kalila Holt has been previously published in wigleaf, Salamander, and The Los Angeles Review, among others, and also produces the podcast “Heavyweight.”
Twitter: @kalilaholt

Kalila Holt, How to Die, fiction

This story grew out of my interest in exploring how mental illness can shape the way we construct (and destruct) the realities around us. I was drawn to the challenge of rendering the voice of a character in an altered mental state within the confines of a realistic story in which that character is our only conduit of information. I wrote “The False Prophet of New Beginnings” to embody the hope, excitement, and desperation of a character simultaneously experiencing mania and striving for a fresh start.

Mark Bessen is a queer writer based in Austin, Texas.

Mark Bessen, The False Prophet of New Beginnings, fiction

The poem was inspired by the actual event explored in the piece. I am constantly amazed by the close quarters that sadness and joy inhabit.

Matthew Lippman’s latest collection, We Are All Sleeping With Our Sneakers On, is published by Four Way Books, 2024.

Matthew Lippman, Conflagration of Joy, poetry

My favorite generative method is to write four poems very quickly, spending no more than a half an hour on each, gathering words. When I get stuck, I open a book at random, find any word that interests me, then include it in the next line. There is one rule: the poems must have nothing to do with each other. When I’m done, I circle the best lines and place them at random as a new poem. Then I search for some way to make the lines row in the same direction. That is how I wrote “Prefigured Hour.”

Doug Ramspeck is the author of nine poetry collections, two short story collections, and a novella.

Doug Ramspeck, Prefigured Hour, poetry

This essay is named after a stray dog that my wife and I picked up on the way home from the wedding suit tailor. Upon returning him to the animal shelter, we were informed that he was a “frequent flyer”—the volunteers were no strangers to this dog’s antics. I wrote this after reading Shapes of Native Nonfiction, an anthology of essays edited by Elissa Washuta and Theresa Warburton, which showcases essays by contemporary Native writers that play with craft and form. It inspired me to attempt a flash piece that, while resisting traditional syntax, still tells a comprehensive narrative.

Remi Recchia, PhD, is a poet and essayist from Kalamazoo, Michigan; recent publications include From Gold, Ghosts: Alchemy Erasures (Gasher Press, 2023) and Transmasculine Poetics: Filling the Gap in Literature & the Silences Around Us (Sundress Publications, forthcoming).

Remi Recchia, Frequent Flyer, flash nonfiction

This poem began from an odd conversation with a few relatives. A poem to me is not a story; it’s a container for parts of what might be several stories. Or multiple different time periods: past, present, and future. Perhaps some of the most significant work I did to the poem as I moved through drafts was eliding and limiting, though it is the title that most helped me collect my thoughts. “Countermand,” what a word—the etymology from French contre (“against”) and mander (“to command”). And what more accurate term than this for memory loss?

Lauren Camp is the author of seven books and currently serves as Poet Laureate of New Mexico.

Lauren Camp, Countermand, poetry

I grew up with a boy who scared me—he was troubled and inappropriate. At seventeen, he was brutally murdered. Years later, far from the wetlands of Massachusetts where we lived (and he died), I was haunted. I felt compassion for his ghost, and even something like regret. Living near freight lines, I learned of the signs left by Depression-era train hoppers as warnings or guides to their fellow outsiders. The two images collided, and I wrote the story to puzzle through all the ways we try and fail to understand—and to care for—the strangers in our midst.

Megan Savage is a queer multi-genre writer living in Portland, Oregon, where she teaches writing and helps coordinate the Carolyn Moore House, the first and only writing residency housed at a community college.

Megan Savage, Tell a Pitiful Story, fiction

In middle age, I’m still trying to make sense of my origin family’s hard journey. I try out different ways to tell our story. No matter how I approach it, I am haunted by the word “bizarre.” It is a word phantom, stuck to me, through shame. When drafting this essay, I wondered what would happen if I owned the word, rather than run from it? “Bizarre, A Life” is the first time I’ve told this story with some humor. I experimented with footnotes to add moments of playfulness, and finally, make friends with a word that isn’t going away.

Summer Hammond grew up one of Jehovah’s Witnesses in rural Iowa and Missouri, went on to achieve her MFA from the University of North Carolina-Wilmington. She is the proud winner of New Letter’s 2023 Conger Beasley Jr. Prize in Nonfiction.

Summer Hammond; Bizarre, A Life; nonfiction

When I arrived in the U.S. for graduate school from Bangladesh, many things seemed confusing to me, including party games like Fishbowl. The idea of being ignored by others is perhaps one of the devastating experiences that many immigrants face. Through this story, I wanted to create that sense of dread we have when we feel like an outsider, exacerbated by our fear that we will not be treated the same way as others, that we will be an outcast or pariah, resulting in rejection and mocking and even violence—all these surreal feelings manifested in this story.

Mir Arif's fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The Los Angeles Review, Sierra Nevada Review, The Daily Star, Fatal Flaw Literary Magazine, The Bangalore Review, Arts & Letters, Himal Southasian, and elsewhere; he is currently working on his first novel, "Soar."

Fishbowl

Mir Arif, Fishbowl, fiction

Robin Littell received her MFA in Creative Writing from Miami University and writes flash fiction and poetry in Yellow Springs, Ohio.

I wrote "Birdsong" in its first iteration almost five years ago. It came to me after an emotional conversation with a friend. It ended up, as many stories do, in a folder on my desktop. When I read it again recently, it seemed to resonate in new ways. At its core, it’s about that connection between the body and our intuition. It’s about hearing that little voice inside us that knows what we need and learning to listen to it.

Robin Littell, Birdsong, flash fiction

Certain themes come up repeatedly in my writing: desire and sexuality, memory and trauma, womanhood and the male gaze. How women’s bodies become our destiny. The walls we build around ourselves in order to survive, and how we choose to reinforce them or let them crumble. For me, the voice always comes first; once I had a grasp on that, various fragments swirling in my subconscious began to suggest a story. For this piece, I wanted to see how far I could push the boundaries of narrative and language, how much a story could be compressed while remaining emotionally resonant.

Sarah Bradley’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in 34 Orchard, HAD, Pigeon Pages, Phoebe, and Stanchion, among others; she lives in Austin, Texas, where she’s currently at work on a novel.

Sarah Bradley, A New Way to Want, fiction

I have always felt, and continue to feel, a deep affinity with Jean Valentine’s poetry. Recently, I took a one-day Zoom workshop with poet Sharon Dolin through Hudson Valley Writers Center. I had been feeling stuck and distanced from my poetry. Hanging by my desk is the Jean Valentine poem, “Light Me Down.” It seemed natural to turn to this poem as I tried the Golden Shovel. The form allowed me to be surprised and paradoxically freed me. The poem told me I was not finished with this subject. The form allowed me to listen to what needed to be said.

Amy Small-McKinney resides in Philadelphia and never plans her poems because the poems always tell her what needs to be said.

Amy Small-McKinney, Rough Pillow, A Golden Shovel, poetry

Lilliam Rivera reads her short story "Place Your Hand Here," first published in Tahoma Literary Review, Volume 2, Issue 1, April 2015. 

Place Your Hand Here, by Lilliam Rivera

I write poems to root down into the truth, like a mole. I burrow and extract. Sometimes, the truth is so painful and uncomfortable, I don’t want to look at it. When that’s the case, writing the poem forces me to shine a light on places I would rather pretend aren’t there and helps me understand my terrors. This poem is one of those.

Meghan Sterling (she/her/hers) is a Maine writer whose recent collections are These Few Seeds (Terrapin Books), Self-Portrait with Ghosts of the Diaspora (Harbor Editions), Comfort the Mourners (Everybody Press) and View from a Borrowed Field (Lily Poetry Review’s Paul Nemser Book Prize), while her next collection, You Are Here to Break Apart, (Lily Poetry Review Press) is forthcoming in 2025.

Meghan Sterling, Three Things, poetry

I thought I was writing a book about the baritone roles in the operas of Giuseppe Verdi. But it became increasingly clear that I was writing a book about myself. So I turned it into a memoir, the story of my mid-life coming out, the refashioning of my marriage, my coming to terms with misogyny and toxic masculinity, all told from the perspective of opera. This chapter is about one of Verdi’s rare baritone good guys, Simon Boccanegra. I use his story to explore the death of my mother and my relationship with my children.

This is an excerpt from a longer essay that can be read in full at https://tahomaliteraryreview.com/selections/daddy-baritone/

Mark Mazullo is Professor of Music at Macalester College in St. Paul, MN, where he has been teaching piano and courses in the history of music since 1999.

Mark Mazullo, Daddy Baritone, nonfiction

This piece came from watching a few historical dramas and reading a short story collection around the same time, which all coincidentally happened to have foot binding as plot points. (Hello, universe, is that you?) I’d always been obsessed with why I never measured up to everyone’s standard of beauty; in retrospect, it was a diabolical hyperfixation that needed a lot of time and experience to break down and understand. (Also, the fact that I wasn’t even allowed to date until I was sixteen never deterred anyone from the boyfriend question, and I clearly haven’t gotten over it.)

Kristi Wong is a genderfluid-y, Canadian-born writer of Chinese-Malay descent, whose work is informed by a stubborn fascination with complexity and nuance, their intersectional identity, and the retroactive grief, joy, and discovery of late-diagnosed ADHD.

Kristi Wong, Bound, flash nonfiction

As a Winnipegger myself I have an adversarial but also nostalgic view of my native city. Generally, I find it more fertile to set my stories and essays on neutral soil, but here I went directly into the belly of the grizzly. Needless to say, the youthful philosophers and scalers of buildings feature prominently in my heritage. Undoubtedly, sprinkles of myself and friends have ended up in this story, though its exaggerations and fantasies are products of Winnipeg alone, that Northern breeding ground of dreams.

Currently a resident of Nashville, Tennessee, Marcus Spiegel’s fiction and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in the Pushcart Prize XLVI anthology, Mississippi Review, Conjunctions, Chicago Quarterly Review, Midwest Review, Boulevard, North American Review, Santa Monica Review, and other journals.

Marcus Spiegel, The Dualists, fiction

I’d like to talk about the style first. It was gotten from Zaynab Bobi’s Finding My Way Home. Before the piece itself, I’ve been nurturing the style inside my head but I didn’t have a fitting body for it. (No) thanks to my friend who sunk my heart with his words (he didn’t even know), I got the body for the style. As we’ve all known, some incidents you thought you’ve outlived are oozed out by another and stretch to more wrecking thoughts. So, I make a line for my built beliefs/promises and the following line for obvious realities/surreal things.

Abdulbasit Oluwanishola, SWAN V, is a young Nigerian creative writer who writes from Ilorin, Kwara State.

Abdulbasit Oluwanishola, A poem where I play and backward my sorrow, poetry

When my son Austen was undergoing palliative treatments for DIPG–a rare, inoperable, nearly-universally fatal pediatric brain cancer–in the fall of 2022, he tried to make sense of his growing immobility through every means possible. Which animal mirrored him the most? The sloth began as simile, then became metaphor. Every time Thomas, my son’s best friend, came to visit, he handed Austen another: a cozy, fleece blanket or a stuffy courtesy of his mom. Each had a sloth motif. By the end of his life, Austen was surrounded by an army of furry supporters—and love from every corner.

Co-founder of SWWIM and Editor-in-Chief of SWWIM Every Day, Catherine Esposito Prescott is the author of Accidental Garden (Gunpowder Press, 2023), winner of the Barry Spacks Poetry Prize.

Sloth by Catherine Esposito Prescott, poetry

This piece is part of a larger project called “My Prayer a Slit Throat: erasing the inheritance of war.” In early 2021, I was revisiting The Iliad with its mixture of startling clarity, tenderness, and horror. I was interested in exploring how this attitude still shapes our cultural narratives around war. My source materials come from war ephemera in the Western canon; different modes of erasure are explored with each source text. Guidebook for Marines is erased by chapter, but I allow myself to swap out the chapter name, so the chapter “small arms weapons” becomes “babydolls.”

Ellen Kombiyil is the author of Love as Invasive Species (Cornerstone 2024) and teaches writing at Hunter College.

Small Arms Weapons as Caretaking Baby Dolls by Ellen Kombiyil, poetry

“The Dead” arrived one morning after I set down Marie-Claire Bancquart’s astonishing collection, Every Minute Is First, to pause and look out the window. It’s that kind of book. It generates a lot of looking out to see the world, which she has suddenly made new again. Or noticing the wonder of a leaf in sunlight, or a single slice of bread. She doesn’t waste a word in those poems, which marry an incisive acuity of vision to a remarkable lightness of spirit. The first line of “The Dead” just came to me, and fortunately a notebook was on the coffee table, and I tried not to waste any words as well.

Michael Bazzett is the author of five collections of poetry, including his latest, Cloudwatcher, winner of the Gerald Stern Prize, forthcoming from Copper Canyon in December, 2025.

The Dead by Michael Bazzett, poetry

In 2023, I spent ten hours on a European bus journey that was supposed to take four. Because of the teeming post-Covid crowds, we were stuck at the borders between Croatia and Montenegro. With hours to reflect, I noticed that everyone else on the bus was a twenty-something traveller, and I considered my own life-changing travel experiences in Europe in my twenties. I’d always loved the collective “we” voice and envisioned this story as an energetic chorus presenting an ode to the magic and struggles of future European travel.

Jillian Schedneck has published a memoir with PanMacmillan, and other work in a variety of journals, including Brevity, Redivider, Fourth River, and elsewhere.

#lasteuropeansummer by Jillian Schedneck, fiction

I was channeling Gwenyth Paltrow when I wrote “The Ocean Floor.” Remember that movie? The sliding doors of the subway train. I feel like the older I get and the stranger the world becomes, the more in tune I am with the multiverse. Or maybe everything just feels slippier? I love language and its capaciousness. In an era when fact and fiction and space and time all clang together like a dime store windchime, the short story form feels particularly satisfying.

Nicole Callihan writes poems and stories; her most recent collection of poetry, winner of the Alma Award and published by Saturnalia Books in March 2025, is SLIP.

The Ocean Floor by Nicole Callihan, fiction

“Bear” is a short, nonfiction piece that came from me and my family making it through the winter of 2025. By any means possible, that’s what we were doing to get through these both literal and figurative dark times.

Melissa O’Neil is a mom, auntie, poet, and writer who believes that the real magic happens when we connect with each other.

Bear by Melissa O’Neil, flash nonfiction

The origin of the story is my ongoing fascination with language’s ability to be two distinct things, one being a finite, logical, objective form of communication, and the other being human connection given a tangible form, a form that happens to be infinite.

Siamak Vossoughi has published two short story collections, Better Than War and A Sense of the Whole.

Hamid Oskou's Father by Siamak Vossoughi, fiction

This story began in a workshop two years ago where we were asked to write a sentence, then highlight words in the sentence that we were drawn to. After that, we were asked to free write a list of 25 words using the words we had highlighted as inspiration. My list (and original sentence) revolved around the seasons, food, and eating. I decided to structure the story around the seasons, and soon after, the idea of how we feed or starve ourselves emerged, but it took me several revisions to understand Lara’s hunger and desire.

Kelly Pedro is a Portuguese Canadian writer whose fiction has been published in CRAFT, PRISM international, The New Quarterly, Cleaver, Flash Frog, New Flash Fiction Review, Fictive Dream, Ghost Parachute, Moon City Review, and elsewhere.

Preserves by Kelly Pedro, flash fiction

My poem, “Jackson Pollock,” is part of a manuscript-in-progress that interrogates famous men in the visual arts and their talented partners and wives who have been overshadowed, silenced, or lost to history. Confronting systems of abuse and addiction in my own family history, these poems intend to queer ekphrasis, gazing back at patriarchal systems in the arts through the lens of women, queer love, or even, in this case, the violated body of the canvas as a sentient being.

Jenny Molberg is the author of three poetry collections, most recently The Court of No Record.

Jackson Pollock by Jenny Molberg, poetry

In the scrappy, early days of Hollywood-based singer-songwriter venue The Hotel Café, a permanent placard prohibited covers of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” Jeff Buckley had pretty much nailed it shut with his 1994 version, but that didn’t stop aspiring songsmiths from favoring early audiences with their take. More homage than hubris, the endless renditions that dominated the tiny, red-curtained stage constituted a form of worship. Years later, with lyrics translated for the funeral of a friend’s mother, the song tsunamied me into a portal of my grief at the loss of my sister, and once again knocked me over with its grace. 

Amy Raasch is a Los Angeles-based poet, musician, and performer. She holds a BA from the University of Michigan and an MFA from Bennington Writing Seminars. She writes about what haunts us.

Broken Sonnet for the Phone Call I Didnt Pick Up by Amy Raasch, poetry

In my life of care, rare disease, disability, and interdependence, I often wonder what I can say to offer parents who are new to disability. How could I begin to summarize and write something useful when all our lives are unique? So I ended up writing a sort of letter to my younger self, to the self in the beginning of parenthood who was both terrified and deeply committed to learning how to parent our incredible child. Unfortunately, I don’t know how to time travel (yet?); I offer it out, hoping some part of it resonates with readers, whether they are parents or not.

Krista Lee Hanson (she/her) lives in Seattle, home of the Coast Salish people, with her partner and two incredible children; her writing has appeared in The Rumpus, The Normal School, and The Write Launch, among other publications.

Show up Late, Show up Early, Show up Uninvited by Krista Lee Hanson, nonfiction

When I found out my birth father died, I didn’t talk about it for weeks. I was surprised by the depth of grief I felt for someone I’d never known. My interest in theoretical science, especially quantum mechanics, gave me a way to make sense of the things I couldn’t name. This essay explores unspoken longings, sorrows that don’t adhere to conventional narratives, and inhabiting an identity that defies definition. It’s about the moment myriad possibilities collapse into one outcome. As South Korea reckons with its complicated history of international adoption, I hope my story adds to the conversation.

Tiffanie Kim is an artist and emerging writer based in Hudson, NY.

Schrödinger's Father by Tiffanie Kim, nonfiction

Davon Loeb reads "Like Gladiators," first published in Tahoma Literary Review, Volume 3, Issue 1.

Davon Loeb, "Like Gladiators"

Benjamin Harnett reads "Yahoo! Answers," first published in Tahoma Literary Review, Volume 3, Issue 1.

Benjamin Harnett, "Yahoo! Answers"

Janet Bowdan lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, with her husband, son, and sometimes a lovely stepdaughter or two.

Tahoma Literary Review actually started me thinking about the challenge of the long poem: what could sustain a poem, a poet, a reader for that amount of time? I thought a letter could be both friendly and expansive. Obviously this poem has its soundtrack. The Broadway musical has conventions, like the “I want” song, but it also follows a story form (exciting beginning, neat wrap-up) that comes full circle.  But the poem is now, where we have no clear path or outcome, so it must go forward.

Janet Bowdan, An Open Letter to Lin-Manuel Miranda in the Key of Trump

This piece came about as a writing prompt I was given this past summer at the Kenyon Review Fiction Workshop. I drew the Devil card from a Tarot deck—fellow workshoppers called this “apt,” for what it’s worth—and endeavored to bring to life the card’s themes of entrapment and domination, danger, and duplicity. The characters are significant members in the (dare I say grit lit?) novel I am currently writing, which is set in the rural Midwest.

Renee is a writer-teacher-mother-wife and hoarder of books who lives in her very own little house on the Kansas prairie.

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