Issue 42.2
Winter/Spring 2022

Jabberwock Review Volume 42.2 Winter/Spring 2022 cover design

Table of Contents

Fiction
Gordon W. Mennenga The Girls Won't Leave the Boy Alone 11
Denise S. Robbins Dear Mermaid, Dead Mermaid 46
Casey McConahay Collections 66
Courtney Sender A New Story 82
Poetry
Jessica Barksdale Joke Poem With Ring 7
When I Wash Raspberries 9
Preeti Vangani It Feels Like Cheating on My Gone Mother 25
Social Desirability Bias 27
A Slow Cover of This Will Be The Day That I Die Plays 27
Alexandra Malouf Snow Tracks 30
Eric Odynocki Expunged 37
Anomaly 39
Kristen Hewitt Dissolution 40
Sara Moore Wagner Leave Me Be, Lord 43
Ayesha Shibli Excavation 44
Derek N. Otsuji If This is Your First Time Traveling by Paddle Board 60
Beth Oast Williams Thirteen Jurors 63
Scott Bailey Rorschach Pasture 64
Jordan Sanderson Brutality 79
Christen Noel Kauffman This is Where the Secrets are Kept 80
Essay
Stephanie Dickinson Houston on the Cusp of Plague 31

Contributors

Scott Bailey is the author of Thus Spake Gigolo (NYQ Books). His poems have appeared in Epiphany, Meridian, Sand Hills, Subtropics, The Journal, The Southeast Review, and Verse Daily, among others. He received an MFA from New York University and a PhD from Florida State University. Born and raised in Mississippi, he lives in the French Quarter.
Jessica Barksdale’s second poetry collection Grim Honey and her fifteenth novel The Play’s the Thing were both published in 2021. Recently retired, she taught composition, literature, and creative writing at Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill, California for thirty-two years and continues to teach novel writing online for UCLA Extension and in the online MFA program for Southern New Hampshire University. She lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband.
Stephanie Dickinson lives in New York City with poet Rob Cook. Her stories have been reprinted in New Stories from the South, New Stories from the Midwest, and Best American Nonrequired Reading. In 2020 she won the Bitter Oleander Poetry Book Prize and TBO has brought out Blue Swan/Black Swan: The Trakl Diaries. Her Razor Wire Wilderness, a true crime memoir based on her correspondence with inmates at EMCF, was released by Kallisto Gaia Press.
Kristen Hewitt has an MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson College. Her poetry and essays have been published in Orion magazine, Terrain.org, Whitefish Review, and Kestrel, and her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She’s been an editor at Orion and the Maine Review, and currently edits nonfiction, comics, and other illustrated books for PAPress. She lives in the Berkshires in western Massachusetts.
Christen Noel Kauffman is the author of the lyric essay chapbook Notes to a Mother God (2021) which was a winner of the Paper Nautilus Debut Chapbook Series. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in A Harp in the Stars: An Anthology of Lyric Essays (University of Nebraska Press), Nimrod International Journal, Tupelo Quarterly, The Cincinnati Review, Willow Springs, DIAGRAM, Booth, Smokelong Quarterly, Hobart, and The Normal School, among others.
Alexandra Malouf is a disabled writer and MFA student at Brigham Young University. She is the managing editor for the Victorian Short Fiction Project and poetry editor of Inscape Journal. Appearing sporadically, her work has received the Ethel Lowry Handley Prize from the Academy of American Poets. When not writing, she enjoys building miniatures and collecting antiques.
Casey McConahay’s work has appeared in December, Lake Effect, and Southern Humanities Review. He lives in northwest Ohio.
Gordon W. Mennenga lives in Iowa City, Iowa and earned an MFA in Fiction from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. His fiction has appeared in The North American Review, EPOCH, The Citron Review and other literary journals. His monologues have been featured on NPR. He's taught fiction writing and film studies at DePauw University, Oregon State University and Coe College. These days he often says maybe when he means yes.
Eric Odynocki is a teacher and writer from New York. His work is often inspired by his experience as a first-generation American with Mexican, Ukrainian, and Ashkenazi roots. Eric’s fiction has been nominated for Best Small Fictions and has appeared or is forthcoming in Gordon Square Review, pacificREVIEW, and Sheepshead Review. Eric’s poetry has recently been published or will appear in Jabberwock Review, Plume Poetry, The Night Heron Barks, Brooklyn Review, and elsewhere.
Derek N. Otsuji is the author of The Kitchen of Small Hours (SIU Press, 2021). Recent poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, The Southern Review, and The Threepenny Review.
Denise S. Robbins is an author, cat parent, and climate activist from Madison, Wisconsin now living in Washington, DC. Her stories have been published in Barcelona Review, Pif Magazine, and more. This piece is part of a larger collection in the works inspired by solutions to the climate crisis, aiming to counteract the common dystopian climate narrative and instead explore how solutions can evoke wonder that echoes within the human psyche. Find her work at www.denisesrobbins.com.
Jordan Sanderson's work has recently appeared in Pithead Chapel and Susurrus. He is the author of two chapbooks, Abattoir and The Formulas. Jordan Serves as the Associate Vice President of Teaching and Learning at Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College.
Courtney Sender’s stories appear in The Kenyon Review, AGNI, American Short Fiction, Prairie Schooner, Glimmer Train, and many others. Her essays appear in The New York TimesModern Love and The Atlantic. A fellow of MacDowell and Yaddo and alum of Harvard Divinity School, she currently teaches fiction at Tufts. Her debut collection, In Other Lifetimes All I’ve Lost Comes Back to Me, is forthcoming from WVU Press. Find her at www.courtneysender.com.
Ayesha Shibli is a Muslim-American poet based in the DMV by way of Long Island. She majored in Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and received her MFA in Poetry from the University of Maryland. Her work has previously won the 2018 Academy of American Poets University Prize and appears in the Iron Horse Literary Review, The Little Patuxent Review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, the Birmingham Poetry Review and elsewhere.
Preeti Vangani is an Indian Writer in San Francisco. She is the author of Mother Tongue Apologize (RLFPA Editions), selected as the winner of RL India Poetry Prize. Her poems have been published in Threepenny Review, Cortland Review, and The Margins, among other places, and her work has been supported by UCross, Tin House, Djerassi and CCI. She currently teaches at the University of San Francisco.
Sara Moore Wagner is the winner of the 2021 Cider Press Editor's Prize for her book Swan Wife (2022), and the 2020 Driftwood Press Manuscript Prize for Hillbilly Madonna (2022). She is also a 2021 National Poetry Series Finalist and the recipient of a 2019 Sustainable Arts Foundation award. Her poetry has appeared in many journals and anthologies including Sixth Finch, Waxwing, Nimrod, Beloit Poetry Journal, and The Cincinnati Review, among others. Find her at www.saramoorewagner.com.
Beth Oast Williams’ poetry has appeared in West Texas Literary Review, Wisconsin Review, Glass Mountain, GASHER Journal, Poetry South, Fjords Review, and Rattle's Poets Respond, among others. Her poems have been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize. Her first chapbook, Riding Horses in the Harbor, was published in 2020.