Beth Gilstrap
There is news along the Ohio River: Some days she has no idea why she moved here to live alone in a house built when her Mee-maw was still sweeping the speck of yard out front of mill housing. It’s angry, the house. The shower floods the kitchen. Slugs come through outlets to mate on the walls and the mess of it is revelation. The voice of ancestors saying, No, love, no. This is no more permanent than the longing for fog, for underworld, for touch.
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Beth Gilstrap (she/her) is a writer from Charlotte, North Carolina who likes to play with genre lines. Her debut hybrid/flash CNF collection, There Is News Along the Ohio River, is forthcoming from River River Books in 2026. She is also the author of two story collections: Deadheading & Other Stories (2021), winner of the Red Hen Press Women’s Prose Prize, and I Am Barbarella: Stories from Twelve Winters Press (2015). She calls the low country of South Carolina home.