I was just starting to tell people how your thirties are so much better than your twenties when I hit my midthirties, and my life felt like it might explode.
POEM OF THE WEEK
Washington
By Caitlin Roach
In our first half year here, time pitches impossibly. The baby stumbles into his first steps, the older boy begins dreaming in daylight away from us.
POETRY CONTEST
Open to all poets. Narrative is always looking for new voices, and all entries will be considered for publication. Each entry may contain up to five poems.
Please see the Guidelines.
SPRING STORY CONTEST
We’re looking for short stories, essays, memoirs, photo essays, graphic stories, and excerpts from long fiction and nonfiction.
Please see the Guidelines.
RECENT AWARDS
Recent Awards for Our Authors
Year in and out, many of our authors receive notable awards, including the BASS and O. Henry prize, and many others. You can find their works here.
NARRATIVE FIRSTS
Publishing First-Time Authors
First-time authors are a regular feature in Narrative. Read the works of some of the remarkable poets and writers who first appeared here.
NONFICTION
NONFICTION
NONFICTION
The Measure of All Things?
By Hal Crowther
There are mornings, not few enough, when I feel like burning my birth certificate and resigning from the human race.
NONFICTION
Tina Turner and My Father
By Deborah Paredez
A diva’s voice elevates a song into a diva anthem by carrying both struggle and perseverance, both trauma and triumph.
FICTION
CARTOONS
FICTION
The Rooms
By Susan Minot
What she wanted, she found herself saying before the sob choked her, was to be able to live—not just with another person, but with herself.
CARTOONS
Cartoon Art Volume 2024-04
By Various Artists
New laughs with a modest matador, some fashionable wishes, a new approach to exercise, the fruits of hard labor, and more.
POETRY
POETRY
POETRY
POETRY
Fire Emblem
By JP Allen
Autumn to autumn, I hold your face in cardboard under my bed till I place it on my paper altar for the Day of the Dead. Well.
Most years I forget.
POETRY
Requiem
By Bruce Bond
The more dissonance you hear, the more you listen, the more it tears from the bone. You could weep for months, years. And then, you stop.
POETRY
Passing and Other Poems
By John Freeman
I look up and meet a woman’s eyes. It’s early evening the night could go another way and for the length of a stride it could.
POETRY
POETRY
POETRY
POETRY
Gargantuan
By T. De Los Reyes
My childhood is a city where tenderness was frowned upon, yet you are now holding my body, whose shape is exactly what I need it to be.
POETRY
Rasam and Beans Curry
By Supritha Rajan
When I raise a spoon of beans roasted with coconut to my mouth, what I see condenses to a series of images.
POETRY
The Reader in Quarantine
By Sharon Olds
The reader was no longer fifty, or sixty. She did not really think of herself as an old woman, though she called herself one.
POETRY
POETRY
POETRY
POETRY
Lightning Takes the Form of Hope
By Reed Turchi
There is nothing I can do, or say, so I turn up the radio, drown myself in climax of guitar to match the boiling in my blood.
POETRY
The Loneliness of Fireworks
By Zhai Yongming
Fireworks and bar girls all dance in revelry before they subside, in the end, into loneliness. Anyone can go wild in this moonlight.
POETRY
Home Is a Verb of Motion
By Grace H. Zhou
On a bald knoll, circled by on-ramps and overpasses, weathering and weighted is a concrete behemoth for the gods of want.
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