Gulf Coast Online Exclusives


The Trophy

Siamak Vossoughi

I'd never felt so sad engraving a trophy before, like I wanted to throw it away when I was done with it.


Bright Perfection

Nancy Au

The chicken crows at midnight. Crows at four o’clock in the morning. Crows when it rains. Crows when the sun sets. Crows when sirens blare down our street. Only stops crowing to eat.

Dead Matter

Katharine Coles

Not fossil not decay unfurls / A shining ladder and makes / Rescue all. In movies / Lets loose, tears off

Dear Cyntoia Brown

francine j. harris

I wonder when you push at mirrors, if they slip off in your hands. I would / like to hold you, who you were at sixteen with the you I was when I was / sixteen.

Common Motivations for Teaching English Abroad, or A Short Physics Lesson

Kelly Morse

I’d bicycle home after teaching, pumping the pedals so hard I hoped the blurred street would crack beneath them. I’d learned early how to leap—from hotel maid to fine dining server, student to teacher, dying desert town to rain-drenched city. So I left. I filled out applications, fielded phone interviews, signed a contract and flew to Hanoi, sight unseen.


From the Archives

A Prayer for the Swamp Phantoms, 1865

Allison Pinkerton

Our boys didn’t come home to the swamp after fighting the North, but James did. He came back with a phantom limb, believing he could feel the clench of the muscles that had been amputated in a surgical tent, bloody saws and chloroform rags and dirty knives.

Second Best is Best

Isaac Yuen

Sometimes being best can be the worst. The prized antlers the wapiti so lovingly drapes with velvet and nourishes with aspen shoots can turn their caretakers into rumpus room decor, even though deerstalkers know perfectly well they could just wait for the elk to finish bugling its mates before picking up the discarded instruments for a song.

Dad's Crossbow and Other Stories

Steph Sorensen

One afternoon of his every-other-Saturdays, my dad took the crossbow gingerly, respectfully from its box on the top shelf of his bedroom closet and led us out onto the apartment’s second-story back porch, a cement slab overlooking the train tracks.

The Moral Kicks In

Peter Twal

& after the first course, your corsage flatlines Beautiful convulsions Then, it sprouts wings, thorns, claws its way up your arm to swallow you goosebump by goosebump


From the Blog

Losing the Plot: On Lauren Berlant's Desire/Love

In their entry on love, Berlant writes that we tend to (mistakenly) use the objects our desire attaches to in order to assume an identity— “you know who…

Feeling Political

For Berlant, part of the problem of politics is that marginalized people have to accommodate the feelings of their majority counterparts in order to successfully…