We lay on Nanna’s roof where the tiles matched the poppies in her garden, slathered baby oil and iodine on our late summer shoulders, dipped fingers in Nanna’s strawberry preserves stolen from her basement, painted our sticky nails to match our sticky lips, talked about blood making the difference between Venus and Mars, watched the iron-rich dirt billow behind Dale’s little Corvette, waved our bikini tops to flag him down but he drove on by so we put them back on, lamented the end of summer and the start of school but thanked the stars it was our last year, counted the days ’til holly berries would match the color of a cardinal’s wing, watched a fiery sunset caress the sky and swore it was the beckoning neon lights of next summer.

Charlotte Hamrick’s

creative writing and photographs have been published in a number of literary journals and anthologies including Atticus Review, Best Small Fictions (2022 and 2023), The Citron Review, Connotation Press, Eunoia Review, Literary Orphans, Muddy River Poetry Review, New World Writing Quarterly, Reckon Review, The Rumpus, Still: The Journal, and Trampset,among many others.

Her fiction, CNF, and poems have been nominated multiple times for awards, including Best Microfiction, Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, and the Pushcart Prize. She was a Finalist for the 15th Glass Woman Prize for her creative nonfiction.

Formerly Creative Nonfiction Editor for The Citron Review and Barren Magazine, Charlotte is now Managing Editor of Reckon Review and writes The Nitty Gritty Interview. She also writes intermittently on her Substack, The Hidden Hour. She lives in New Orleans with her husband and a menagerie of rescued pets.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Two Stories by Charlotte Hamrick (“Traveling the Soul Train Line” and “Hurry”) in Bottle Rocket (17 January 2025)

⚡ A Small Town Triptych, CNF by Charlotte in Reckon Review (16 August 2021)

⚡ Homes of New Orleans, photo essay and Artist’s Statement on Beauty in Peacock Journal (6 December 2018)

⚡ Hidden Magnolia, photograph by Charlotte in Nightingale & Sparrow (Issue II: Renaissance; 2019)

⚡ Spring Rain, photograph in Nightingale & Sparrow (Issue II: Renaissance; 2019)