(Creative Nonfiction Contest Winner) Consider the plastic specimen cup—the kind you pee in at the doctor’s—boxed with other mementos of a previous life: a sheathed hunting knife, a merit badge sash, newspaper clippings…

Reliquary

By the time I portrayed Dolly Parton in the fifth-grade variety show, I could ride a headstrong pony through a green pasture. I could find cherry tomatoes growing wild beside a weathered barn and pull them, whole and salty as the sun…

I Felt All Flushed with Fever

What If Every Town Had a Pioneer Grill Like the One at Jackson Lake

we stood surrounded by red. Tulips,
carnations, the scarlet angora I wore

in solidarity with myself
because I’d never dreamed

of a white wedding,
never dreamed of marrying

a man who’d already said I do.

Kory Wells

Selected work