Third Wednesday Magazine – Page 2 – Third Wednesday Magazine

Gracie / Patricia Wallace

Published on March 12, 2026 by Editorial Staff

The Spring issue will include the winners and honorable mentions from our annual poetry contest. Here is one of the three H.M. poems, as selected by contest judge Marilyn L. Taylor.

Pounds / Kimmy Chang

Published on March 7, 2026 by Editorial Staff

Pounds
by
Kimmy Chang

I was 135. Then 125. Then 99. My big sister graduated and left for college. Ma said it from the sink—hands wet, eyes down: You’ll join her in two years.

Ma dressed me in my sister’s old clothes. Sleeves that swallowed my wrists. Cuffs worn soft where her fingers had worried them. I made Ma pack my sister’s usual lunch for me. At school, I dismantled it. Bread, cheese, ham, bread. The ham came off in a damp sheet. The cheese left a pale sweat on my fingertips. Her homemade cupcake—whipped peaks, chocolate curls—something I couldn’t separate without ruining.

A thick binder waited on my desk, rings yawning. The papers inside had my sister’s cursive in the margins. I pressed my pencil until the lead snapped. I reached for the eraser again.

Kimmy Chang is a Texas-based writer and computer-vision engineer. A 2026 Writers’ League of Texas Fellow and Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in trampset, ONE ART, and Sky Island Journal, among others. Read more at https://www.kchang.xyz/.

Lobster Claws / Jennifer Handford

Published on March 7, 2026 by Editorial Staff

Lobster Claws
by
Jennifer Handford

Charlotte Collins sits cross-legged on a mat in a meditation room at Santosa Springs, a wellness retreat tucked in the misty Berkshire Mountains. Kel the guru is cute—Charlotte’s age, thirty, give or take—the type of guy Charlotte would have loved in her twenties, an enlightened, touchy-feely feminist in the body of a mountain biker, but those guys wanted to know her, wanted to look into her eyes and understand how she was feeling. Charlotte had no interest in swimming in the deep end of that pool.

“There’s a difference between chest and belly breathing,” Kel says. His biceps wink from his fitted hemp T-shirt.

Charlotte raises her hand, feeling her ponytail dance on her shoulders. “Breathing doesn’t usually work for me. I’ve tried, but it makes me more stressed.”

Charlotte’s inability to breathe is why her boss, Diana, VP of Commodities at JP Morgan, called her into her office. “Have you seen that PSA? Khakis and golf shirt type of guy, but then he starts fentanyl, and his face turns ashen and his skin becomes thin as cellophane.”

Jennifer Handford is a former high-school literature and composition teacher and is currently an MFA student in creative writing at George Mason University.