Contributors

Clare Beams
Contributor History
Biography
Clare Beams
Clare Beams’s novel, The Illness Lesson (Doubleday), was a New York Times Editor’s Choice and was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize; her story collection, We Show What We Have Learned (Lookout Books), won the Bard Fiction Prize and was a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize. Her new novel will be published by Doubleday in 2024. She lives in Pittsburgh and teaches at the Randolph MFA program. 

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In Print

Vol. 82
Conjunctions:82
Works & Days
Spring 2024
Bradford Morrow

Online

Confessions of a Thief
by Jeffery Renard Allen
April 24, 2024
The July morning was alive with a sound in the air, strange communications, the acoustics of the big yard amplifying each rustle, each wave. Odd creatures glittering on the ground. Herds spread lavishly, a wilderness of transparent wings, bug eyes, a mosaic of glassy fragments. Glinting. They covered the grass, the sidewalk, covered the branches of the trees.
One-Eyed Jack
by Rick Moody
April 17, 2024
The sound reverberated in my sense of what was right and reliable in the world like drone weaponry, and what I wanted to ask was: what business have you left undone, and did you do a thing you so regretted that you can’t let go of it, was there a person you cut off, when sympathy would have been the better gesture, was there a person you trod on to get ahead in your sales job, speaking ill of them, so that they were forever harmed, did you say something awful about a friend in school, did you call a friend the worst of names in middle school, because it was a thing they said then, the boys did that, only to find, later on, that you loved that boy in a way . . . .
Seven Poems
by Leah Flax Barber
April 10, 2024
I do not like old water.

The water in the ocean is old

The lake is old

But maybe it’s not

Subject to the logic of time, of old and new.

Water.