Blood Orange Review Volume 7.2

"Pool House" by Karen Callan

"Light Rain" by Karen Callan

Poetry

Deborah Bacharach | bio

In 1969 I had secrets—cookies
I stole, dolls I buried head first
in the sand, forty thousand
Hmong carrying CIA guns ... [more]

Nancy Flynn | bio

The Winter We Lived in the Church & It Snowed Daily & the First Barrel of Crude Oil Traveled Successfully Through the Trans-Alaska Pipeline

It was the bitterest night. I couldn’t sleep so I rose
from our altared bed. Found Ella doing Gershwin on the radio,
traced the sanctuary planks, hours of dodging dreams.
How hard, that year. Yet my feet remembered to arch
their fragile bones then sultry-slink past the ash—
come dawn, the fate of the woodstove’s coals ... [more]

Alexis White | bio

You Asked to Come In

It was as if I had found you on my threshold, bathed in yellow porch light, a halo of gnats around your head, and I could say yes or no. For the first time I realized the body was a house I hadn’t lived in for years, a house that’d been broken into long ago ... [more]

The SECURITY issue
Volume 7.2 | Summer 2012

Editor’s Notes:
Security

Where do we find security—in the house where we grew up, behind the walls that protect us from uncertainty, in the sunlight, under the covers, among friends or relatives? Obviously for each person, each race and gender, the answer is different. Because I have three children, I find security in the work I do, in the small amount of money deposited in my bank account each month. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, I am lucky. Currently over 12 million people in the United States are unemployed—that’s roughly 8%. .... [more]

Nonfiction

Martha Clarkson | bio

True Crime

From the time he was a teenager, my father was obsessed with mysteries. Murder, mostly. Not so much an appreciation for the traditional writers like Poe, with live organs beating below floorboards, but about those movies with cryptic notes delivered by expressionless men in tight collars, about elongated shadows on walls lit by streetlamps, about people trying to outwit a clodgy gumshoe ... [more]

"Twist" by Karen Callan

Fiction

Abbey Numedahl | bio

Handspring

Please come back to gymnastics, Annika.

I know it’s been a long time. I’ve finally graduated college, but I haven’t stopped coaching. Call it penance or bad luck or just life, but I’m still here, waiting for someone to coach with even half your talent. Please believe me when I say that I still think you could be really good. You are squandering your potential by staying away .... [more]

Lindsay Purves | bio

Concept Analysis

Comfort

When you think of comfort, you think of a dark place. You think of a place that wraps you in its arms. A place where no one can touch you.

You’re six months pregnant when you stop wearing your grandmother’s necklace .... [more]