eMerge Magazine - Woody Barlow Contest 2024

Paper Doll Summer
by Elaine Alarcon

Through the screen doors at either end of the shotgun house, cool and sweet, a breeze creates a wind tunnel smelling of rain. In the sultry summer hours June Allyson, Liz Taylor, and Jane Powell flutter in the shifting currents of wind - paper dolls pinioned to the screen door by little hands, but not for long. Light quickens to a lurid scowl over the horizon and the hot suffocating wind catches and stills, breathless, awaiting the twister. No birds sing in this caesura. Footsteps hurry to th
Mother Tongue
by Zhenya Yevtushenko

My mother tongue is my first country where white crows fly and black sheep graze on idioms, where proverbs hide like mushrooms growing in a maze of Karelian birches and pines, where needles sing the songs of my babulya’s hands her lullabies, her stitchwork freezing snows in threads, I had them framed for my mother’s American home, for our mysterious Russian soul which likes to wrap itself in floral shawls and enigmas hidden in a worn карта, которая меня находит, Я – неграмотный компас, a
Edible Stone
by Erin McGrane

Three tomatoes will never be enough. One mango could never suffice. Your toothpaste heart can’t brush away the sweater you left last season, the seasoning of you still the recipe for my disaster and still my favorite dish. You, little tomato fruit, pretending to be a vegetable more at home in the savory, salty pot but still a fruit, a seed, a fleshy heart. I bite your surprisingly protective skin not nearly as thin as it looks thinking of juice ripe as blood. You, sweet, simple mango, edible s