Author Archives: Dale

What’s Left by Dina L. Relles

He stands beside me with his back to the bar, knees bent, so our eyes meet when he asks What do you want to do with me? though he knows the answer is take him to a lamplit corner of the sidewalk and feel his unfamiliar mouth on mine, though he knows want is not have and say is not do and so what’s left […]

Show Don’t Tell Was Easier by Anna Kahn

For Anita She hands me a sheaf on which she has spilt someone else’s blood and asks me to edit. I mark with hesitance, black ink because red won’t show. It is tricky to suggest justice to facts two layers of truth away from your own without overstepping. She hands. She asks. I mark with […]

Replica by Katie Kalisz

It takes a whole team of experts to handcraft a face from a skull. They get good at looking back and forth. Each muscle fiber must be layered properly over the replica skull. Smithsonian tells me there are artists whose work is to resurrect these strangers, ancient remains who anthropologists unearth. The end result is a figurine, […]

Continuing Education by Mun Say

There’s a bird. There’s a bird in the middle of the road. There’s a bird in the middle of the road, flapping its featherless wings and reaching nowhere. There’s a bird in the middle of the road, flapping its featherless wings, reaching nowhere, silent in its journey. There’s a bird in the middle of the […]

For Harry Higgins by Jennifer Wolkin

the first freak she ever met. Long, lanky, laconic, Larry? Harry, you said softly, Harry—with Allen Ginsberg glasses & Alice Cooper nail polish you were never clandestine when you followed her around campus & took the same Comp Lit course (covering Cather’s “My Antonia”) & you listened like she said something worthwhile while she laughed at you—your belief in […]

Quitting by Greg Emilio

We smoked. We smoked. We smoked one, then another, then another. Our smokes held hands, daisy-chained like lemmings into the abyss. We smoked because of that third drink. We smoked because our conversation was just getting good, because our words needed silver flesh. We waved our smokes like wands, cast love-spells over each other. The […]

The Way We Should All Go by Jack Caseros

There’s a Financial Analyst at the far end of the meeting room, running a finger along an over-sized spreadsheet. She wants to know how I over-spent. It is troubling—double over budget. The Board of Directors doesn’t understand. To their shareholders, they said environmental stewardship was the cost of doing business. Now that cost was too […]

I Knew a Cop by Hannah Vanderhart

Probably not a great cop. He worked undercover for the county for seventeen years. He collected narcotics. When his wife grew angry, she would walk gently through their ranch, stroke the corner of every picture frame until the lines of the house registered a 1.5 on the Richter scale—a microquake. Not enough to break a […]

Growing Up in a Basement by Jeff Burt

Lego Men Galvanized water pipes three-quarter inch soft to sight like crushed gravel beneath the soft soles, six and twelve inch ducting dull silver, a few copper tubes. Nails, chalk marks, a plumber’s hieroglyphics, and two Lego Men hidden years before and forgotten, staring down onto the tan futon couch and the bleached wicker chairs […]

Lacrimae Rerum by Howie Good

They killed and killed and piled the bodies up high. In the pile there was someone’s neck, someone’s head, someone’s leg. A neighbor’s child was able to crawl out, I don’t know how. He kept begging for water in a faint voice. It takes a long time to get over everything that’s happened. People no […]

Delaford Street by Ann Howells

Assassins crouch behind an oleander hedge turned yellow in rejected city light. Textures and folds are visible within the darkness. Flies in mournful swarms descend. Bombings might become less common did we not seek to read about them so avidly. Protest groups named with forced acronyms picket the door; I consider turning off the neon […]

Ella Fitzgerald Sang “Summertime” While California Birds Issued Hazardous Substance Warnings by Lyndi Bell O’Laughlin

California birds were always chirping something in the background. One oleander leaf can kill you. So don’t eat it. Me and Bonnie, strumming guitars, trying to sing our teenage girl ways into the future. My voice quiet, not sure if everyone’s house held the same secrets, her voice wide as Ella’s, Your daddy’s rich and […]

Mapping by Erika Eckart

It is about uncharted territory, the screaming that is. His mind has mapped the known world, his known world, and it expands only fitfully and under great duress. This is like the early cartographers, who suffered at the hands of tar pits and wild beasts and the elements in order to document the shape of […]

Dreamsympathy by Logan Ellis

(after Dorothea Tse) In the dining room of your dream, our families are joined for dinner. Fire sits cross-legged at the table in my sister’s place, arms outstretched, leaning & expectant like a punctured crucifix. It doesn’t even know what to say. Get your elbows off the table my mom shouts to Fire, and it […]

This is a Universe by John Michael

I – Instantaneous Eternity Universe There is a universe where humans never evolved to tell time, and everything happens all the time and all at once. Every person lives their entire lives for an instantaneous eternity. It’s like they’re binge watching their life stories while playing games on their phones. They miss out on the […]

Instagram Poem #11 by Rebecca Gaffron

Weeknight and there they are–Farmer and the Master of the Manor–the two of you, queens of nothing and kings of even less. Embodiment of some Freddie Mercury song (it doesn’t matter which). You’re gagging for it. Now that you’ve connected the dots of drowning men lost in the undertow of who you might have been–actor, […]

This is a Thing You Think by Ben Slotky

There is a scene that you think you remember but can’t remember from where. It is in a book. Something you wrote. Something you will write. Something you imagined, something that happened or didn’t, and in it a man is walking up a long driveway. It is in the forest, the driveway is. The man […]

Wanton Moon by Cindy Hochman

Let’s begin by revealing the machinations of the moon—her sources and methods, her bare-faced shenanigans, hiding behind a veneer of buff-colored virtue while spinning narratives from the whole cloth of the spurious sky. Tonight the moon is all ruddy-faced and duplicitous, a lewd and promiscuous bride, sullying the celestial bed as she swallows you, and […]

Dreams by Emile Benoit

You’re supposed to remain calm in an emergency, even in a dream as hordes of hungry jackals surround you discussing dinner plans while you’re two hours late for the only plane leaving this nightmare until tomorrow night. Good decisions come from a mind free of panic and confusion, yet it’s often impossible to remain composed […]

Big Rigs, Whales & Gravity by Fred Vogel

I’m smarter than most people I know. You know, those people who say stupid things about things they know nothing about. At least when I open my mouth I have something smart to say. At least that’s what the stupid people tell me. And they should know since they’ve never said a smart thing their […]

Caregiver by Megan Wildhood

Our team of doctors gave us a choice for recovery: sleep on a bed of nails, walk hot coals with a refrigerator strapped to your back or swim the Arctic with hungry sharks and we chose bed of nails because it’s close to work. You just wish you could take ten seconds and do the […]

Contributor’s Note by David Spicer

Jack Doe, known as the Unknown Poet, has had poems published in over 50,403 poetry journals, online sites, e-zines, and newspapers—almost every one of them insignificant, irrelevant, and inconsequential. They are his prized possessions that he has crammed on bookcases around the perimeter of his poet-cave. He also has had four sonnet-sestinas published in The […]

Monster Portraits by Del Samatar and Sofia Samatar Review by RL Black

As we’ve come to expect from Rose Metal Press, Monster Portraits is a hybrid creature, a collaboration between a sister and a brother, part illustration, part text—the text part inspired by the drawings, rather than the other way around—and part autobiography. Because how can you look at monsters without also looking at the self. Described […]

Ho Chi Minh: A Speculative Life in Verse and Other Poems by Benjamin Goluboff Review by Unbroken staff

Take a subject, any subject, pass it through the speculative heart of a poet, and it is transformed, it becomes something new, or maybe reveals something that was there all along. This is what Benjamin Goluboff has done in this collection. With powerful language and stunning imagery, the poet begs us to look again at […]