We sailed from our homeport at Charleston Naval Base in June of 1999 en route a three-month deployment to the Eastern Mediterranean Sea
Nonfiction
Naming the Stars
When I was little, I used to think that when the sun went down it would take the clouds with it, clearing the sky for the stars.
Karaoke Blues
Then the door parts. If this is a western, he’s the lone cowboy drifting in on a gritty breeze.
Some Things I Used To Remember
We never spoke of my father. Nobody did. Her first marriage was strictly off limits. When I finally did build up the nerve to ask about him, she abruptly told me that her current husband was my father.
Chain-Link Fences and Barbed-Wire Regret
The first thing you need is a friend or family member who gets sentenced to prison.
Girl on the Screen
In the summer of 2012, in my hometown in south Louisiana, I rolled burritos while waiting for college to begin. Just as my restaurant job neatly framed those three summer months, so did the search for Mickey Shunick, the big sister who never showed up to her brother’s high school graduation.
Claire Comeaux
Claire Comeaux is from Lafayette, LA, and is a senior at Hendrix College, where she serves as Poetry Genre Editor for the Aonian. Her poetry was published in the 2015 Southern Literary Festival anthology.
A Toothless Landscape
Sometimes I imagine life as a sprawl of disjointed of photographs, a series of still-lifes in sepia that preserve some kind of timeline.
Funeral for a Childhood
I remember the moment it clicked: The realization that everything I thought I knew, all my memories, represented a fantasy interpretation of events; untrue.
Compartmentalizing
I am becoming immune to body-counts, to the number of people who have been maimed or killed by bombings and drone attacks in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen.
Inside a Whisper
How to find a home inside a whisper and take up residence there like a monk in an earthen corner with his tin cup of rose water and his hands scraped raw from gardening…
Fine Dirt and Dead Birds
A dirty brown dove sits on the small ledge created by the hightop Chevy’s box. It just sits there, looking around wildly.
Tea Bags from Shaw’s
The habit started in Maine, the tea drinking, I mean. Massachusetts, where I live mostly, is more of a coffee kind of place – busy lives, kids, jobs. But on a wintry Saturday afternoon in Owls Head, when I’m alone in the house and writing, or supposed to be writing, the act of sitting with… Read more »