Two weeks out of a small, liberal arts college, Gwen found herself lost in the dark, somewhere in the deep woods of Wisconsin. She was one of two adults in charge of sheparding four inner city Chicago youths through a month of camping and basic survival skills. She was hired thanks to her recent degree, […]
The summer of my junior year, I killed my best friend, Tony. True, it was a car accident, but I was the driver, and it could have been easily avoided. We hung upside down in a tree, the result of speed, a five-beer buzz, and cresting the hill we’d jumped a hundred times going faster […]
Where there are women there is safety. I am on the couch in my grandparents’ living room. My grandfather’s arthritic mutt, Prince is on my lap. I stroke him calmly while my mother, grandmother and aunt clear the dining room table. Their voices rise and fall reassuringly. This ocean-like murmur is interrupted only by my […]
For Anne Burton My daughter hates magic, which is to say that after all this time she still hates me. Her mother was a tight rope walker. Sometimes I want to tell her of the extraordinary, gravity defying love she was born out of. Getting pregnant threw off Angel’s center of balance, and then rooted […]
Barbara Harroun is an Assistant Professor at Western Illinois University. Her most recent work appears or is forthcoming in i70 Review, Sugared Water, Per Contra, The Riveter Review, Pea River Journal, Hermeneutic Chaos Literary Journal, Mud Season Review, bioStory, The Lake, Emerge Literary Journal, Sediments Literary-Arts Journal, San Gabriel Valley Poetry Quarterly, Lunch Ticket, The […]
