Broad Ripple Review

2026 Broad Ripple Review Prize Winner in Fiction When the gods showed up—when the two of them puckered the sky like a cancerous breast, then split it apart, descending halfway between my house and Connecticut—I felt a familiar confusion. It was how I’d felt on 9/11, when I was fifteen-almost-sixteen, my junior year of high school. Was this actually a big deal? Would this actually change the world? Or was this more like when everyone said that Blu-Ray disks were the media of t

2026 Broad Ripple Review Prize Winner in Poetry My grief counselor pounded the arms of his desk chair so hard he replaced them twice in two months. He tells me, You can’t save anyone, son, & God, how I want to believe. Dear Heavenly Father, didst thou sculpt us in the dark? What does one call one half of a duet? Of what use is a lone ski, barreling down black diamonds? I can rip this paddle so hard I tear the river & still, I’ll drift in circles. It’s autumn in Los Angeles &

2026 Broad Ripple Review Prize Winner in Creative Nonfiction I am standing on the Provincetown pier, waiting to board a whale-watching boat, when I get a text from my aunt saying my dad’s left lung has collapsed. My legs turn liquid and I kneel, one knee against the rough hot boards. Nobody looks at me, nobody asks if I’m okay. Maybe they think I’m retying my shoes. My aunt says she will keep me posted. I tell myself there is nothing I can do right now, force my feet up the m

In my home office hangs one of the seven photo-collages my niece made for my parents’ memorial ceremony. I picked it for the pictures of old cars and old pets: a Corvair and a Firebird; a cat, a kitten, and a dog. The dog is medium-sized and stands across my mother’s lap. It probably has its back paws on her thigh and its front paws on the arm of the chair or sofa, though neither—thigh, chair —is visible. My mother has one arm under the dog’s belly and the other over its ru

Tú, mijo. Your English is better than mine. They will listen to you. Tell them not to take me. Tell them that in the pueblo I was accustomed to living with hunger as my most intimate companion, my closest friend, my only inheritance. That my neighbors, too, were poor but happy, content to live a simple life where we tended to one another with generosity, nourished only by a few cold, hard tortillas. Tell them that we lived without vanity or pretense, faithful to God and hu