By Anh Lee 2nd place winner of the Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize We last beyond a century we are forgotten smelling of indigo bodies and abandoned plains enshrouded in sand We feel our desires flicker and wriggle perimeters kissed by thunder, shaped by doves and caressed by lingering legs We…
Newton Considers the Still Life
By Charlie M. Case Winner of The Jennie Hackman Memorial Prize for Short Fiction (1st) Some kind of sweet thing takes hold of you in the late summer. It’s not much. You take it for nostalgia—standing in the pick-your-own orchard, your family and best friend flitting about selecting perfect…
A Year In Review
Written By Ally LeMaster A Year In Review: Long River Review has been a literary tradition at the University of Connecticut since 1997. This week, our staff published Issue 27, which highlights a diversity of stories ranging from topics of the generational impact of immigration to the…
Aromantic’s Apotropaic
By Charlie M. Case (with a borrowed line from Nicky Beer) Winner of The Edward R. and Frances Schreiber Collins Literary Awards (Poetry) This is not something anyone can eke out of me, so stop asking. Put your hands on me and don’t misinterpret—let me touch you only so we…
The Cardinal Girl
By Sarah Kelly Winner of The Edward R. and Frances Schreiber Collins Literary Awards (Prose) There was a cardinal who used to perch in the ash tree next to my apartment building. I could look out my window in the morning and see it as I made another ration of…
Displaced
By Zeynep Özer Winner of The Long River Review Graduate Writing Award Three Women That’s when they started talking. Not when the man with the gun walked into the puddle of blood. Puddle of his wife’s blood. Not when the puddle turned cold turned light painted sirens red and blue. But when…
First Motel
By Krista Mitchell Winner of The Jennie Hackman Memorial Prize for Short Fiction (3rd Place) The First Motel Off the Highway Bethlehem, NH. August 1956. She held a hand to her forehead to shield her bloodshot eyes as she turned off the highway, the windshield glittering with flecks of…
Arboreal: A Field Log
By Zeynep Özer Winner of The Edwin Way Teale Award for Nature Writing 1 There is a tree on my way home. It’s planted towards the middle of the sidewalk. The road, otherwise pedestrian, makes a sharp curve around it so that one would have to change their course significantly…
The Mule (2024)
By Ashley Pizzo A translation of “Lu sceccu” by Ignazio Buttitta Winner of The Aetna Translation Award The poor thing carries the chain, and stupidly, he bears it. Shackled from dusk ‘till dawn, to and from the mill he is drawn and quartered, as the master, broom in hand,…
Little Loves (2024)
By Gabrielle WincherhernWinner of The Aetna Creative Nonfiction Award On some level, you always thought love was going to be the thing that saved you. Maybe it started with the fairy tales, the movies. The Princess and the Pauper. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Barbie and the Diamond Castle….