Read the winning piece of our 2025 Nonfiction Contest “Through the Mirror” by Jessie Cato selected by Lucy Ives.

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Nov/Dec 2021 • Vol. XLIII No. 6 |

Open When Alone

Dear Jeremiah,

Most birds do not have penises, did you know that? Chickens, for instance, don’t have penises, they have cloacas, which is an organ I can’t quite get my head around; I’m trying to imagine two bottles of soda stuck together and the liquid from each pouring back and forth between them—that’s about all I can get out of the cloaca. But ducks absolutely have penises—massive, corkscrewed penises that emerge from inside their bodies as they waddle toward their conquests and fit perfectly inside the internally corkscrewed vagina of the female duck.

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Robert Travieso is a high school English teacher in Baltimore, Maryland. A graduate of the Brooklyn College MFA program, his stories have been published in Tin House, One Story, and Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, among others. He is at work on a novel in stories.

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