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Excerpts

From Issue 24: "Porous Rock" by Demetrius Buckley (poetry)

From Issue 24: "Porous Rock" by Demetrius Buckley (poetry)

Reading Time: 4 minutes "Porous Rock" debuts in Issue 24 of Tahoma Literary Review.  This poem moves with an emotional energy that draws from the ...

From Issue 23: "North" by Kelli Short Borges (Fiction)

From Issue 23: "North" by Kelli Short Borges (Fiction)

They are lost. Bea has suspected it for hours. Her heavy boots crunch through the thin layer of ice that has settled over the once powdery snow. Overnight, an unexpected freeze has coated the vast wilderness south of Missoula, its beauty in juxtaposition to the uneasy twist Bea now feels in her gut...

From Issue 23: "Nine Lives" by Darci Schummer (Nonfiction)

From Issue 23: "Nine Lives" by Darci Schummer (Nonfiction)

The women at the community college spend hours in the tutoring center. They dream the future. Their eyeliner is from drug stores, cheap brands that cost a few dollars and come in a kaleidoscope of colors. They always choose black.

From Issue 23: "Family Meditation (after Jacob Lawrence's John Brown Series, #13)" by Andy Fogle (poetry)

From Issue 23: "Family Meditation (after Jacob Lawrence's John Brown Series, #13)" by Andy Fogle (poetry)

Reading Time: 2 minutes "Family Meditation" debuts in Issue 23 of Tahoma Literary Review. I was struck by the beautiful construction in this ekph...

From Issue 21: "Self-Portrait of the Writer on Their Thirtieth Birthday, in Nine Scenes Starring 'All My Friends' by LCD Soundsystem" by Jax Connelly (Nonfiction)

From Issue 21: "Self-Portrait of the Writer on Their Thirtieth Birthday, in Nine Scenes Starring 'All My Friends' by LCD Soundsystem" by Jax Connelly (Nonfiction)

Just the other day, during an hour-long run with “All My Friends,” LCD Soundsystem, on a loop, one watched another fat raccoon amble down the trunk of a sturdy maple tree, swagger over to the sewer, and pour himself away. One should have taken a video, but one didn’t. One couldn’t—the sight of him pinned all one’s corners in place, legs frozen bent and crooked, arms stuck akimbo like a couple of to-do lists pinned to a bulletin board. One had never seen a raccoon in real life, and what a petty wonder, the way he moved—so lazily, like he’d woken up in the past and would be content to remain there, whole and unscathed, snug inside this handful of moments stretched out, sustained, swollen with every passing yet to come.

Posted in Best American Essays, Notable Essays 2021

From Issue 23: "Nola Face" by Brooke Champagne (Nonfiction)

From Issue 23: "Nola Face" by Brooke Champagne (Nonfiction)

Listen, I haven’t been looking forward to admitting my blonde problem. It’s as shamefully a part of me as my propensity to turn silently sour when I don’t get my way. My dark skin and hair and reading obsession designated me early on (at least in my own mind) as culturally Not Beautiful, which gave me access to that other realm for awkward girls, Chubby/Funny. But I couldn’t even be notable at that.

From Issue 23: "Lines of Communication [Survival]", by Sue Scavo, Poetry

From Issue 23: "Lines of Communication [Survival]", by Sue Scavo, Poetry

"Lines of Communication [Survival]" by Sue Scavo, from Issue 23: 

"This is what this tree teaches me, the one hollowed, burnt,

twisted: when something happens to the body, it is not reason

to stop. Instead, keep all impossibilities. ..." 

From Issue 22: "Spoons" by Karen Kao (Fiction)

From Issue 22: "Spoons" by Karen Kao (Fiction)

Yeonsoo is not the type to hurry. She’s precise and methodical, the qualities the bank demands from their executive assistants, no matter how many sirens might go off. She applies her lipstick, carefully re-arranges her bangs to achieve the correct not-too-tousled look and checks her handbag. 

From Issue 23: "Fertility Awareness" by Brianna Avenia-Tapper (Nonfiction)

From Issue 23: "Fertility Awareness" by Brianna Avenia-Tapper (Nonfiction)

My mother has spent more time in the earth than anyone I know. She grows food from rich soil with her own hands. She has exactly one joke. It goes like this: What do you call people who use the fertility awareness method of birth control? The punchline is parents.

From Issue 22: "Nine Drops of Turpentine" by Alafia Nicole Sessions (Poetry)

From Issue 22: "Nine Drops of Turpentine" by Alafia Nicole Sessions (Poetry)

Dear Daughter,

If a time comes where there is no other
way / if you find that the world has turned 
bitter as nine mugwort / if you suspect 

From Issue 22: "Rerock" by David Simmons (Fiction)

From Issue 22: "Rerock" by David Simmons (Fiction)

His earliest memory was of caramel, not of actual caramel, but of an imagined caramel that materialized out of thin air and hovered above his father’s head. The kitchen of their Lexington Terrace tenth floor apartment smelled like rat shit and water damage. A wood-tip Black and Mild smoldered in a coffee mug. The boy flicked the light switch and watched the roaches scatter, some of them big enough for him to hear the sound of their thorax rubbing against the linoleum countertops.

From Issue 22: "There Will Be More Sunrises" by Susan L. Leary (Nonfiction)

From Issue 22: "There Will Be More Sunrises" by Susan L. Leary (Nonfiction)

I do not tell him that the people buying scratch-offs and cold drinks are more beautiful than the sun. Each one rising and falling with the light, unaware that they, too, are awestriking and splendid. Unaware that to live is to exist at the threshold between the miraculous and the mundane.