THE KEEPING ROOM
The Keeping Room is an online magazine for all women writers, poets, and artists.
We are looking to publish your short stories, essays, free writing, poetry, and photo essays that touch on topics related to Women’s Wisdom, Lessons Learned, Self-care, Bodies, Relationships, and Community.
Writers selected for publication will be paid $25 via PayPal. Submit via Submittable.
***Simultaneous submissions are accepted, but please notify us immediately if accepted elsewhere.
***All material must be original and unpublished.
Anticipatory Grief by Debbi Welch
Isn’t good old-fashioned grief enough? Loss, tears, the flooding of memories?
FICTION
Catch and Release by Stacey C. Johnson
It’s easy to get used to certain things, like aching shoulders and a sense of floating outside your life, looking down. A person who isn't prepared to lose what's gone will do whatever they can to hang on until the line breaks. When we used to go to the aquarium, Pa...
A TALL GLASS OF LEMONADE ON A HOT DAY By Cindy Knoebel
The burly sheriff, pressed uniform the color of gravy, knocks on the frame of the tattered screen door. “Mrs. Ordwell?” Cups a hand around his eyes, squints into the interior gloom. A basket of laundry on the floor next to a sofa covered with a flowered sheet. A...
Another Bride in Porto by Jennifer Sears
“When I desire you a part of me is gone…” Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet In Porto, everything shimmers with white. Churches with white towers line the city’s white hills. Women wearing flowing white pants and white high heels hobble up and down the city’s...
Blurter by Patricia Dutt
They drove all day without any music, leaving the Finger Lakes in Sam’s old Honda just ahead of a snowstorm that would close the schools and the airport’s two gates. Sam sat beside Matt reading poetry and listening to podcasts. Somewhere in the blue hills of Virginia,...
I Don’t Have Time for This by Carol Denson
“Jen, will you spray my mouth?” “Coming.” Jen stopped scrubbing a pot, dried her hands, and walked into the bedroom. “I need my melanoma,” Margo said. “Melatonin, Mom. Melanoma is skin cancer,” said Jen. She pointed the sprayer into her mother’s mouth. Margo gasped...
CREATIVE NONFICTION
Drawing Blood by Sherry Stratton
Blood draws have been hard on me my whole life. The medical techs tell me my veins are small. Sometimes they resort to a pediatric needle. And I’ve learned there’s such a thing as a “butterfly needle.” Once, I was turned away at a blood drive because they didn’t have...
Fight Like a Girl by Justine Payton
CW: sexual violence The man who settled himself between my legs was twice my size. I immediately felt suffocated beneath the pressure of his weight, each inhale rattling against my throat. I was aware of the contours of his legs and genitals pressed tightly...
The Shattered Six-Year-Old Speaks and I Ask her to Return by Gabrielle Ariella Kaplan-Mayer
The shattered six-year-old Before the day I found out about the death camps, my world was Muppets and stories and waiting for the school bus. When I saw particles of dust in the sunlight, I did not think of human flesh. I thought the world was built from love. That...
There Are Giants in the Sky by Natalie Chih-lu Hung
One chilly February evening, my 4-year-old and I sit on his bed, our eyes locked in a playful stand-off. He has just requested Goldilocks and the Three Bears as his bedtime story for the 21st time in a row and I can’t take it anymore. In a last-ditch effort to save...
Her Longing & His Loneliness by L Grace G
Our marriage counselor asked, “So, what happened that night?” I thought back, remembering how our boys were tucked neatly in bed, nestled up under in their warm covers… I returned to the kitchen to do the dishes, and paused in the entrance. There he was, standing at...
POETRY
Watercolor Study, Incarnate by Alison Lubar
Watercolor Study, Incarnate I. ----- PM when the suburban navy blue becomes--------------------matte-black mid-------------------------------night chill, streetlight curfew--------------------stars recede----------to silver beads i want to blend these moonscape...
Poems by Sandra Kolankiewicz
Masterpiece In the painting, he is about to getwhat each time is his heart’s desire: access, the surge, the insecurity turninginto affirmation, fulfillment, release. Her face shows she feels it too. She is thefruit bowl on the table, and he is hungry, knows touching...
The Women I Remember by Sarah Cooke
The Women I Remember I awoke to shoutingand shadows cast by a small fireat the far end of the room.They say memory is a temple to a past best seenwith technicolor eyes. But I remember the storiesabout fires at night and the smell of wet metalpressed unforgivingly...
Eye for an Eye by Elaine Sorrentino
Eye for an Eye-----------post radiation After I silently counted the last “six Mississippi”under the linear accelerator,lowered my armsand rolled off the table,the technician tosseda fistful of confetti in the airand handed me a certificateof completion. In private...
WHITE BOYS THINK THEY OWN ALL THE CREEKS
by Leah Jones
WHITE BOYS THINK THEY OWN ALL THE CREEKS But not the mud in the bend of the road creekIt’s the field feedin’ creek--------------------------------life creekfull of crawdads beneath current-worn rock creek--------Growin’ up we all played wildamong ice covered...