Summer 2026: What Remains

This new issue of Broad Ripple Review begins with what remains. Across these five pieces, writers return to moments that cannot be contained neatly by time: loss, rupture, isolation, violence, and the fragile rituals we create to hold onto what is changing. These works ask what we carry forward when something has altered us, and what language can reveal about the experiences that continue long after the moment itself has passed.

Joe Baumann’s “Leave Us In Death With Ease And Plenty” opens the issue by imagining grief as something tangible, something that can be held, inherited, and transformed. Through a world where the body itself becomes a vessel for memory and abundance, Baumann explores the strange coexistence of devastation and gratitude. Carl’s ritual is both an act of letting go and an acknowledgment of everything that remains, asking what we owe the people we lose and what they leave behind for those who continue.

That question of what we carry from others takes a more intimate and complicated shape in Ari Cordovero’s “What We Said When The Water Ran Cold.” The piece examines the stories we construct around the people we love, and the distance between understanding someone’s history and confronting the harm they cause. Memory becomes unstable terrain, where tenderness, longing, anger, and grief exist alongside one another. What emerges is not an easy resolution, but a careful examination of the ways people can be both wounded and wounding.

In Gordon Brown’s “King of Infinite Space,” the boundaries of survival become quieter and more expansive. Through the voice of a young narrator who creates meaning within a landscape defined by isolation, the story explores the identities we build when our worlds become smaller. The endangered pupfish at the center of the piece becomes a reflection of adaptation itself: survival as both vulnerability and persistence, a way of continuing despite conditions that were never meant to be endured.

That same tension between care and disappearance shapes MJ McGinn’s “The Hard Part Is Keeping Them Alive.” Through the meticulous attention given to a pair of tomato plants, the story explores the rituals people create when they are trying to maintain connection across distance. Care becomes an act of devotion, but also a way of postponing recognition. What is being preserved is not only the plants, but the hope attached to them.

Daniela Buccilli’s “Italian Shoes” turns toward the lasting imprint of a moment that resists explanation. In spare, devastating language, the poem traces the aftermath of violence through memory, the body, and the object left behind. The shoes become both evidence and burden, carrying the weight of this experience. The poem captures the complicated ways harm remains present, even as a person attempts to move forward.

Taken together, these pieces examine the traces left behind by what changes us. We preserve, we remember, we adapt, we care, and we carry. None of these responses can return us to what existed before, but each offers a way of living with what remains.

Thank you for reading Broad Ripple Review. We are honored to share this work and grateful to the writers who trusted us with pieces that are thoughtful, searching, and unafraid to sit with difficult questions.

If this issue resonates with you, we invite you to submit your own work. We are always looking for writing that is attentive in its language, deliberate in its structure, and willing to remain with what does not easily resolve.

With gratitude,

Kelly Schoenegge
Editor, Broad Ripple Review

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