Applesauce

Her family loves apples so despite the fight she carted off in a cardboard box the tree’s fruit. My family has applesauce in its veins, was what she told me. When I saw her there were cores littering her countertops, a pan boiling on the woodstove. Did she see the metaphor? Those gnarled branches over her head. I took her coring knife, though cut fruit was a present I would not be offering, not to my relations. Beside me she sliced another tree-gift. By stovelight our wrists flashed, the lines in them crisscrossing as we worked, tangling and yet not.

From Guest Contributor Colleen Addison

Three Hands

I was born with three hands, all roughly the same size. People often mention how lucky I am. To be able to wave hello, or goodbye, to three people at once. Or how nice it must be to applaud more than everyone else. But what they don’t understand is I only have two arms, two wrists. There is nothing for my third hand to connect to, so I carry it around everywhere I go. One hand is always busy holding my third hand, which leaves me with just my other hand, my poor other hand, doing everything on its own.

From Guest Contributor Jason Heroux

Jesus Christ Superstar DJ

The most impressive thing Jesus has done recently other than walking on water and dying for everyone’s sins is buying that used turntable at a yard sale. From the moment his fingers graced the platter, he couldn’t stop himself from shredding sweet jams, morning, noon, night.

Wrists limp in constant trance, eyes filled with stars, he gave birth to melodic mixes that wafted through windows and pierced hearts.

The evening he stood on that stage holding the Cincinnati DJ Superstar rhinestone-encrusted first place trophy, a tear streamed down his cheek. This one’s for me, Dad. This one’s just for me.

From Guest Contributor Ashley Jae Carranza

Milk

In the beginning, I cried for it. Yet each night after dark, I threw up that sour formula, that fake milk warmed in glass bottles my mother tested on her wrists, so I wouldn't burn my mouth.

Still, my mouth burned. I was a difficult baby, thin and colicky. I hungered but could not accept nourishment.

That's how I began: Born at just five pounds, brought home in a receiving blanket, placed in a crib where I protested and screamed, the vein in my neck throbbing.

Years later, I'm still protesting, still screaming.

It scares me to close my mouth.

From Guest Contributor Cinthia Ritchie

Cinthia is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee who writes and runs mountains in Anchorage, Alaska. Find her work at Water-Stone Review, Evening Street Press, Third Wednesday, Best American Sports Writing 2013, Sports Literate, The Boiler Journal, Cactus Heart Press, Mary: A Journal of New Writing, damselfly press, Memoir, Sugar Mule, Foliate Oak Literary Journal and other small presses. Her first novel, Dolls Behaving Badly, released from Hachette Press/Grand Central Publishing