(These are excerpts--click on the title to view the whole piece!)

Life In America: Cow Foot By Candlelight
 
In those days nobody went to America (except the great Chief Nnamdi Azikiwe). Everybody went to England where they visited Trafalgar Square and took grainy black and white pictures of themselves in winter clothes with thousands of plump pigeons doing the unthinkable all over their heads and other body parts. They came back home to Africa with something called the Golden Fleece.  
 
Ikhide R. Ikheloa

 

The Fourth Hush Puppy: A Journey from Joke to Paradox and Disaster
 
I have never been one who has spoken with gods, though in childhood, as a Philadelphia Roman Catholic, I did, for awhile, attempt to contact one in particular who I finally reckoned must have been forever busy with more pressing things. That there was never an answer to any of my queries was finally enough to allow me to draw the conclusion that most of our gods are either deaf and/or dumb, and that those who actually do break the silence are of a much lower class, the mercenary deities with direct connections to very earthly fundraising schemes.  
 
Jim Gourley

 

Reflections on Glass
 
"Sometimes the same people, sometimes different ones," says Auggie Wren, the storyteller in Auster's screenplay, Smoke, who photographs the same spot for "four thousand straight days in all kinds of weather... And sometimes the different ones become the same, and the same ones disappear. The earth revolves around the sun, and every day the light from the sun hits the earth at a different angle."  
 
Andie Miller

 

Ghosts
 
I was different; I fought like a lynx with her paw caught in a trap to get free of the land. You'd think that I never looked back once I got off of the ridge. Yet, I planted a stand of dill in a certain spot in my garden that I never harvest, I just let it seed itself and keep growing. The wind blows across it and right in my bedroom window most nights, and I can smell it.  
 
Sherri Linn Kline

 

Bull Meadows
 
Various members of this commune had attempted to erect a tipi in the meadow between the cabins, but that project had fallen by the wayside, so that only the tripod poles stood, a monument to the imagination if not the ability of the people who came and went.  
 
Kat McElroy