Venetian Blue and Other Obscene Colors

"She’s waiting tables at a good-eats restaurant by the Kanorado exit to I-70 when she first begins to remember. There is no shining moment of clarity, nothing drug up from her past. But suddenly Marissa no longer has to write down orders."

Mnemosyne, Missouri

"It’s the end of the world and we’re going to the grocery store."

Your Local Giant Eagle Grocery is Proud to Serve You in the Event of The Apocalypse

"Today his ankle is gone. As days go, it’s a good one."

There Are 206 Bones In the Human Skeleton and to Love You Only Requires Most of Them

"The last time I went to work was March 5, 2020."

Atom Bomb, Baby: How Fallout 4 Did Not Adequately Prepare Me for the Apocalypse

I took Dan’s hand with my purple fingers to warm them up. I tried to breathe and open myself up to the experience I was about to have, one that, according to the brochures, “totally reimagines Shakespeare as an aether".

Ophelia in the Bathtub

"My parents have always said they will die on the farm / even as my father makes plans for a wheelchair ramp from house to barn / so that my mother can take care of the ewes when her own hips quit"

Killing In The Name Of

"My cure sits, cross-paged and glossy / above the Five gum and Reece’s cups / and I don’t even reach for it."


I Find the Cure for My Auto-Immune Disease in the Grocery Store Check-out Line

"In one of my first undergraduate writing workshops, our professor informed us that she was only interested in normal fiction. When we asked her to specify, her response boiled down to “no orcs.”"

How Surrealism Can Bring a Spark to Your Writing

"When I think about that summer I worked at the drug store on Charles Street, what I remember is the pollen. Something in the world had gone out of whack, and the whole summer was choked with the stuff."

Runner

"On July 20, 2015, an article appeared in The New Yorker detailing the specific ways in which my hometown will be wiped off the face of the earth."

Sahalie A Martin

Books

Selected work