Cincinnati Review

With candid facts and personal recollections, Jenny Bitner interrogates why flash fiction includes the deaths of children.

In “Loss for Words” Asma Al-Masyabi explores the links between trauma and the loss of language, connection, community, and self.

“The peephole is installed backward,” my one-night stand said as I sat up in bed. We were in his high-rise studio apartment. “I keep meaning to tape a piece of paper over it.” I thought about what this meant. A tiny aperture gave passersby in the hallway a fish-eye view into the bedroom. It wasn’t …

“Father would guard the door, saying 
Don’t go in there, your mother is busy
She will be out soon”

In this holiday tale we ride along with the inhabitants of a toy railroad through scraps of the narrator’s own family history.

Two poems by an exiled Iraqi poet that blend the everyday with the horrors of war.