Winter 2026 Issue: What We Carry

This new issue of Broad Ripple Review is built around a quiet, insistent question: what do we carry when no one is looking?

Across these five pieces, you will find characters who hold onto objects, bodies, rituals, and people long after they have slipped out of reach. A trash bag tucked into a coat pocket in Tokyo. A deer run outside a trailer window. A bent license plate, a scarred skull, a locked bathroom door, a red stain on concrete that may or may not be blood. Each piece is obsessed, in its own way, with what lingers. Not just memory, but the physical trace of having lived, loved, survived, and been shaped by other people.

Zary Fekete’s The Things I Do Not Throw Away opens the issue with a meditation on order and residue. What begins as a practical adjustment to life in Tokyo becomes a quiet spiritual practice, a way of reckoning with addiction, survival, and the cost of keeping oneself intact. Waste, here, is never just waste. It is proof of having moved through a day. It is evidence of having been alive.

Ani King’s Deer Run shifts us into an electric register, where the body itself becomes the site of risk and revelation. The frozen landscape, the battling bucks, and the breath between two people on a bed all blur into one charged moment where queerness, fear, and desire pulse beneath the surface. This piece understands how watching something wild can wake something equally wild inside us.

Kristine Langley Mahler’s A Plate a Name, a Pile of Dirt brings us deeper into the archive of the body. Head spasms, childhood accidents, religious talismans, and the looming sense of deferred catastrophe converge into a powerful meditation on how we store trauma in flesh and bone. Objects become witnesses here, metal and wood and dirt holding what the mind cannot fully release.

In Confessing to Mrs. Dalloway Through a Bathroom Door, Yvette Naden gives us perhaps the most volatile space in the issue: a locked door, a forbidden relationship, and the dangerous intimacy of being known and hidden at the same time. Desire here is not safe or tidy. It is obsessive, erotic, humiliating, and deeply human. The piece asks what we are willing to risk in order to feel chosen, even for a moment.

And finally, Alfred Luarca’s Red Commas gathers the issue into something like a requiem. Through the figure of Yaya Clemen, we are given a story of love and labor, myth and memory, diaspora and class. The red stains she leaves behind become a map of care that outlives her presence. This is a story about what it means to call someone family and what it costs when that word is not backed by action.

Together, these pieces form a conversation about the traces we leave on each other. They ask how we survive the people we love. How we live inside bodies that remember too much. How we carry what cannot be neatly discarded.

Thank you for reading Broad Ripple Review. We are honored to bring this work to you, and grateful for the writers who trusted us with these intimate, ferocious, and luminous pieces.

If this issue resonates with you, we invite you to submit your own work. We are always looking for writing that is brave in its attention, precise in its craft, and unafraid of complexity. Our submission portal is open, and we would love to read you.

With gratitude,
Kelly Schoenegge

Editor, Broad Ripple Review

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