The police sketch artist says I haven’t changed a bit. Like Western civilization since 1500, I’m still not that entertaining, but thanks to my electronic tan, my digital clothes envy me. If you discount their continuous spam, their spark isn’t as bad as their light. Sometimes, I see people and they look crisp and clear, […]
Author Archives: Dale
There Were Good Days Too by Scott Hicks
Scattered stuffed animals and toys; the echoes of home in an empty chest–our sanctuary: fort, wagon, and ship. On the floor, the jetsam of old Tonka trucks, planes, and plastic soldiers. Three boys revel in make-believe. Cowboys riding dinosaurs or pirates: no captains, three scalawags. A voice cold as a northern storm thunders, “lunchtime, wash […]
Half of Courage is Rage by Sara Backer
We like our illness poets to sound resigned, beaten, accepting, and wise. No accurate melodramatic descriptions of poo or pus or puke: we don’t want to see the face of your suffering we want your illness to be symbolic of something larger, such as the Calvinist-rooted discrimination against the ill or the Capitalist cruelty of […]
The Devil’s Pockets by Freesia McKee
The devil carries a wristwatch with a broken strap. When you ask her for the time, she pretends the battery is also dead. And that’s how you never leave her room, small and hot. There’s no comfortable place to sleep. When she comes home each day after completing The Devil’s Work, she lies and says […]
Spoiler Alert by Jim Woessner
On page 79 we learn of Sheila’s true motivation, which is nearly lost in a sea of red herrings. Sheila wanted Jack dead not because of his numerous infidelities and unprotected sex. She simply wanted to wipe the persistent smirk off his face. Unfortunately for Jack, she wiped off more than just his expression. You […]
Quiet and more nocturnal by Bryan D. Price
now heavier because I am really desperate to get you on the phone give you this note involve you in my epistolary novel about (or pieced together from) old photographs fragments of conversation profane marginalia old tapes I have of us listening to the night noise outside our window the instinct has always been to […]
Pictographs by Bryan D. Price
now you are reading naked in bed from a book about yoga it is unashamedly hot in here surpassed only by a rare day in the fifteenth century when someone (or some godlike force) let all the steam out of the core and the oceans reversed themselves I have asked for a similar reprieve—nothing like […]
American Limbic by Jason Gebhardt
Mister Rogers tiles BLANKET for a Triple Word Score, then rests his hands on his knees and smiles. Center stage, the game board is agleam with letters. The audience applauds. Stage right, atop a stubby Doric column, an amygdala drifts jellyfish-like in the pale translucent liquid of its jar. The twin organ resembles two melting […]
Smoke and Wake (a Poem in the Form of the State of Wisconsin) by Jason Gebhardt
Jason Gebhardt’s poems have appeared in many journals, including The Southern Review and Tinderbox, and his chapbook Good Housekeeping was published in 2016. He has received multiple Artist Fellowships from the DC Commission on the Arts. >
Opera Template by J. Paul Dutterer
Seduce a peasant. If you do not know what a peasant looks like, seek a woman with an expression of superhuman purity, probably wearing a kerchief, an apron, and maybe even wooden shoes. Find out that she is your archenemy’s sister. Vow undying love anyway. Arrange to be surprised in the act by someone, preferably […]
Dive Bar by Josh Joseph
Sometimes I drive to an unfamiliar town and pull in at the most miserable bar it has to offer. The scene is always similar. Cigarette smoke swirling beneath yellow-stained light fixtures fixed above the heads of yellow-stained people. Old-timers. Frail in both appearance and demeanor, lighting the next smoke before the first is done. In […]
The White Church on White Church Road by Josh Joseph
There’s a church nearby. Modest in size. Too small to hold any sort of substantial flock. Here, everyone is greeted by a handshake and a name. Their kids are asked after. Out back a small cemetery rents time in eternity. The tenants sleep through the comings and goings of deer and foresight-gifted squirrels. Only mild […]
Zeus Gets a Ticket by Ian Willey
Zeus is going 60 in a 45 mph zone when a siren screams and a booming voice orders him to pull to the side of the road. He stays in the car with the window down a crack as a cop comes up and asks if he knows why he has been pulled over. Almighty […]
Cynthia by Lauren Turner
I walk up the steps to the apartment where we live, beside the college. Everyone who lives here attends the college, except you. It’s autumn: your stack of scarves almost entirely obscuring your face, but I know you’re in there. Last week, you left a series of notes on the walls admonishing your fellow tenants […]
The Secret Knowledge of Backroads by Lauren Turner
For Henry ‘Gip’ Gipson There’s no app for being stuck at the train. There’s not even a feature in the map app for that. They have built the internet so tall that our faces lead double lives within a Cloud, but when the train stops—we’re all catapulted […]
The Lake Will Provide by James R. Gapinski
The supermarket slides into a sinkhole. Our garden fills with rotten, slimy things. Deer and small game are specters. Dad says the lake will provide. The lake is black and deep. Its surface is smooth, like glass. Even on windy days, when the trees creak and bow, the lake is glass. Always glass. We drop […]
Issue 26 CONTENTS
read issue > Ian Willey A Sad Story Limbic Limbo Plain and Simple Michael Brockley Player to Be Named Later Harrison Candelaria Fletcher Basic Training Aaron Sandberg Antinatalism Teacher, Dream Cassandra Atherton Wanderlust Moon Paul Jones Pig’s Eye The Church of the Misdirected Saints Dan MacIsaac Manx Cat […]
A Sad Story by Ian Willey
Last time I saw him was just after our wedding when after ten years he’d dropped out of college for the nth and final time and was doing the same thing he did back in high school: delivering pizzas. He was even working at the same place. In fact, the manager was one of the […]
Limbic Limbo by Ian Willey
Someone I knew obliquely through work got married and I was invited by default to the reception. I was standing off to the side by myself waiting for the right time to leave when a man who looked like the head waiter came up to me and asked if I’d seen the second appetizer selection […]
Plain and Simple by Ian Willey
I wonder what it would be like to be the parent of one of those minor characters who gets killed off early on in movies like Predator and Kong: Skull Island. How do they react when a pair of men in sunglasses drop by their homes in a post-credits scene to break the news by […]
Player to Be Named Later by Michael Brockley
For a change, you drive away from the setting sun. Steering your old Chevrolet toward the minor league towns of Ohio and the Civil War graves beyond. As a child, you collected baseball cards. Each week buying a pack of five cards for a quarter at Schlichte’s Grocery. Bo Belinsky. Pumpsie Green. And Harry Chiti, […]
Basic Training by Harrison Candelaria Fletcher
Hunting each other through the South Asian jungle of our New Mexican yard as silent as toads under street lamp light our lost fathers beside us like moths in the closet drawn to photos in the bottom of a box we can never quite reach to capture or kill or just let it go this […]
Antinatalism by Aaron Sandberg
I witnessed the act of my conception but have since forgotten the details and now sit squarely in a booth smiling with friends but slowly gathering back the finer points of my creation. And with each flicker of scene like a dusty film across my eye, I feel further from grace and closer to them […]
Teacher, Dream by Aaron Sandberg
The F-plus student is chasing me down the never-ending school hall to ask what can be done as I try to hop into a locked locker but can’t recall the combination so slip into an open class to see that it’s a final and I’m naked and haven’t prepared and I fail and I wrap […]
Moon by Cassandra Atherton
i. The third night, we drink too much tequila and you sleep on the edge of my hair until noon; your body curled around me like a single, right parenthesis. I feel your breath on the rounded curve of my shoulder; respiration like a steady metronome. This is my happiest hour: three quarters of a […]
Wanderlust by Cassandra Atherton
I’m addicted to travel adapters: two or three-pronged, round or flat pins, straight or on the angle. I keep some in my desk drawer, a few in my bag and one under my pillow, that I stroke to get to sleep. The universal power adapters are my favourite, the prongs move in and out with […]
Pig’s Eye by Paul Jones
Most people have us take them out so they don’t explode when they’re cooking whole hog. In the pit, it’s not too bad. A little loud sometimes. And the mess looks like tears on the pig’s face. But cooking head-on on a spit is another matter. The first time I ever saw a pig’s eye […]
The Church of the Misdirected Saints by Paul Jones
I stopped at the entry of the Church of the Misdirected Saints to look at the carved doors. Images of small animals. Pets, I imagined. Comic as cat memes. Ferocious as their wild cousins. A paw batting at a bird. A fanged mouth carrying a lizard. A rabbit without a head in the jaws […]
Manx Cat by Dan MacIsaac
A latecomer, by dark, the full moon obscured by storm. The straggler slunk up the Ark’s wet ramp, lanky tail slick with rain. Last in. Mostly. The tom paused at the sill, sniffing the peppery scent of cypress beams and the stench from a hold rank with beasts. The great door avalanched. Laggard tail—severed. The […]
In Transit by Gwen Sayers
My father fled the morgue on New Year’s Eve, two days before we buried him. He traveled with the north wind, spitting sleet. He blew in through a keyhole with his fogged mind, clogged heart, and homelessness. The house shivered. I turned up the thermostat. An iridescent scarab clattered across the floor and vanished under […]
A Cautionary Tale for Beginners by Lyndi Waters
I used to think attachment was a good thing and I became a barnacle. Stuck myself to lampposts and mailboxes. My attachments had a gluttonous quality, and I would eat things like paintings of moonlight loitering on lakes, washed them down with rivulets of water licked from my grandmother’s umbrella. In my living room I […]
The Wonder Years: a Scatter Plot Analysis by Kyle Hemmings
The quiet girl next door is found dead from too little air. I loved her from a distance, from an upstairs window.*** “All god-fearing men sing like gorillas in the rain,” says Sister Maureen, who is slowly going senile.*** Mother brings home a pig and decides she can neither kill nor stuff it.*** “Is there […]
from: “I Was Told That Every Poem Was About the Moon” by Ann Pedone
I bumped into Anne Carson when she was on her way to Bendel’s. I pulled out my pocket dictionary and asked her why the entry for “sky” was a blank space. She mumbled something about Baudelaire and the relationship between Jacques Brel and The Oresteian Trilogy. I couldn’t really follow. I nodded politely and left […]