Why We Like It

“Hotshot” closes with the realization that sometimes a fire gets too hot and high for anything else to stop it. These final lines can also serve as a metaphor for addiction—sometimes the fire of it can only be put out with more fire…

Julialicia Case: I’m not much of a baseball person, or even a sports person, so when I came across Dave Mondy’s essay “And We’ll See You Tomorrow Night,” I did not expect to be swept away. After all, the piece focuses on the “Best Baseball Game,” a twelve-inning matchup between the Minnesota Twins and the Boston …

Antechamber – Joshua Coben* The father is a dark door the son may lean against to listen for the locked room of himself, his next life. Later he will listen there for the echo of his own death. Meanwhile he becomes a dark door for someone else. It takes him years to grow so broad …

Anonymous crawled down a muddy slot in the earth to put red handprints on the cave wall, Anonymous who painted the Crab Nebula onto a rock ledge and translated the winter wind into black ink on vellum, Anonymous the unknown worker, toiler in darkness, craftsman with a name drowned in shadow. All our works are …

A self-proclaimed tech-geek and amateur dog-trainer, new volunteer and first-year PhD student in fiction Brenda Peynado has a talent for incorporating her disparate interests into conversations at the CR office. A discussion about the midterm elections or streamlining our contact database can lead Brenda into an analysis of the male catcall in the Dominican Republic …

Cincinnati is in the midst of its sixteenth coldest stretch on record. Each day is somehow icier than the last, each parking space a bigger snow mountain, each small dog more reluctant to go outside, no matter how plaintively nature calls. In such conditions, we at the mag kvetch a lot. We spit. We claw. …

Recent volunteer and PhD-poet extraordinaire Julia Koets joins us by way of San Francisco and Summerville, South Carolina. When asked about how the Midwest stacks up against northern California and the Deep South, Julia graciously restrains her contempt for goetta, her bemusement about the Ohio General Assembly, and her utter indifference toward the Bearcats this …