With all the sadness in the news, I can’t afford to mourn each reported death. Such grief is unsustainable, says my therapist. It’s like Red Rover: Only the choosy side survives. Send over the small stories too weak to breach the wall—don’t call for suicides, bullets, bombs, children ripped from their mother’s arms. So I […]
Category Archives: Issue 18
Behold the Beauty of Effort by Elizabeth Paul
In spite of ourselves, we become things we never expected. We are trying in a world that is full of trying. Notice the straight lines and close joints of careful, confident trying. Note the rash, pragmatic diagonals of impromptu trying. We call this trying problem solving, but its slanting dynamism reveals it is far from […]
In Light of Recent Events by Elizabeth Freestone
I consider becoming a witch. I kill the blue light, sit at the wall and stare at my hands. At the backs of my hands. I spend the hours considering. In the dark, I consider gathering armfuls of heather, cradling them, like a child, barefoot in the grass. I’d adorn the buds with honeysuckle and […]
As Girl Children Do by Abby Burns
Without turning around, the girl child spills purple paint out the car window from her seat in the back. Her wrist straining on the window edge, hair glistening white with the afternoon. Purple suffocates windshields and lampposts and stop signs and people. It weaves between clouds until the sky turns Van Goghic and anyone who […]
Understanding Each Other in the Dark by Matthew Smart
The shadow messages from passing traffic shine through the bedroom curtains to flash their plans onto my ceiling. They tell me that things should be clean. The darkness of my room reveals all of the world’s imperfections. But what is clean nobody agrees. I used to think the smell of rotting pine needles in the […]
Some Days It Is Better To Say Nothing by Grant Guy
Some days it is better to say nothing, unless you are Tom Horn about to get hanged. If you are Tom Horn you get to say, “You are the sorriest looking bunch of damned lawmen.” & & & &, what is even better, if you are Tom Horn, you get to select your own hangman. […]
Also into you by Bryan D. Price
There is something unmanageable about subtlety in such dark times. Soon there will be nothing to recognize as familiar. Landscapes of our youth have long been forgotten in the service of mobility. It is in our historical cruelty to blow indiscriminately across the maelstrom. I have lived among beautiful people but never said so to […]
Extinction in Four Causes by Daniel Uncapher
Material: of the wood in the table, the marble in the statue, the plastic in the stomach. Concerned citizens in colorful suits drew water from certain measured depths and recorded the pH levels while whales, confused by the pounding, beach themselves on candy-colored shores. On closer examination the reproduction cycle of frogs is once again drawn […]
Niespodziany by Benjamin Niespodziany
The dentist’s receptionist leaves me a voicemail in Polish because my last name translates to Grand Surprise. I tap dance on dumpsters when no one is watching and still I hide behind a lengthy curtain when I eat my porridge. I am a puppet that stinks like an uncertain sea urchin. Enough algae around my […]
Desafinado by Adam J. Davis
In a green field threatened by a swarm of bees or the hum of refrigeration and each time I close my eyes Tony Soprano is sitting before me, picking his nose. A woman in black and white puts her finger to her lips and shushes me silently. Brazil is closer now: Sao Paulo. Fortaleza. I […]
Morningtime by Samuel Lieb
Yesterday I woke up trying to fuck a lemon; the acid didn’t sting so bad as the last time. The juice was everywhere: on my chest on my pillow on the framed picture of my sister on her french-braided hair. I was on top, I was on my knees, one hand against the headboard and […]
Letter by Steve Passey
Hey. Long time no chat. I was thinking how there used to be this sign above the bar in the Club Cigar in Great Falls, Montana (where the girl behind the bar had a mouth full of Skoal and bought me two beers on the house once and smiled at me.) The sign said: “We […]
The Ways We Were Gifted by C.C. Russell
There’s a certain quality to the air in that memory, a certain way the cigarette smells. It has been a decade since you last smoked, but the sour taste is still there in that breeze, still a hard swallow and burn at your first gulp of smoke. First cigarette in a graveyard. It’s funny in […]
Glow by Erik Fuhrer
Momma was a Kangaroo. Daddy was a mouse. Momma had a pouch to store the time daddy gathered from running up clocks. They loved me dearly: called me pink little flesharoo with a whiskery voice, rubbed my skin with linseed oil so it kept its fresh rosy tint. We left our home in 1914 to […]
Dermatographia by David Joez Villaverde
after Jon Davis This is not a dirge because I am sick of mourning and we are not a thing to be mourned. Because apologies are just a commemoration of self-pity and we are pitiless. Because words cannot hold themselves. I wanted to tell a story. Say something about forms and formlessness. Where indelible is […]
Flora by Carolyn Oliver
Outside in Massachusetts it is February. Yesterday it was winter. Today the heat runs thick, like raw honey. Inside the botanical garden the plants are awake and rioting. Camellias, hibiscus, birds of paradise, orchids. Stamens and pistils, spindly sex. Overwhelmed? Go back. In the alcove, there, time hasn’t gone so far. Find sun worshippers, extracting […]
Funeral Parlor by TS Hidalgo
Silence. Silence. Death has come (and you can have success, despite it, if one gives everything one has). The week has also come, and with it an evolution of the lowest temperatures. They’re still talking about precipitation, winds from the north; we don’t rule out frost. Unmistakable dreamlike atmosphere: women and men turned into red birds, that cross an equally red cloud study us. All of this […]
Cards Stacked Against Humanity by Lauren Lubrino
Folding chairs, a game. The only objective is to keep guessing. What the other person wants to hear. You accuse me of cheating. But why would I cheat when there is no real end or prize? A stack of random cards. In circles, we keep guessing. Burned paper, lighter fluid and a metallic aftertaste of dead […]
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 […]
Wearing It by Natalie DeVaull-Robichaud
My mother gave me the clothes of her sister to wear. But the faded red jumper hung heavy and smelled of someone else’s sweat until that too faded, and when my mother looked on me, there was no getting beyond what she saw. But I didn’t get it as bad as the Turpin children. Since […]