treatment room the sun shower on his face Another 15 minutes. Let’s see if I can do this. Anything that comes to mind, right? First there was Gerry, then Billy, after Billy came Nigel, then Billy#2, even though Billy#1 was still around, followed by Andrew whose sister Susan liked me, which was weird, I think […]
Category Archives: Issue 21
Disguise by Brad Rose
I stopped at a Mobile mini-mart, and bought some gas and groceries. You can buy hair dye in a mini-mart, change your hair color in the bathroom, if you need to. Sometimes, I hear the deep blue wire of the sky, hissing. Even at night, when the clouds crawl on their soft knees through the […]
Like a Bird by Sarah James
In a past life, Tina must have been a bird, Jack thought. His girlfriend pecked chocolate chips from a snack bar, then threw away the remnants. She’d scoop a lump of cookie dough from his tub of Ben & Jerry’s like a hungry sparrow attacking the fat-balls his mom strung in the garden. She wouldn’t […]
Appropriate by Karen Marron
When my sister came to visit me in New York, she cried. Everyone dresses so nice here, I’m scared to leave the house in what I have. The same thing had happened to me; I would obsessively look at the clothing of each person I passed to find something resembling what I was wearing, for reassurance […]
Last Night by Jason Heroux
Last night a deep-fried chicken wing dreamt it was still alive, and cried. Life soldiers on. On the bus I overheard someone say, even dead leaves look and sound leaf-like if there’s enough wind. Birds are buckets of song raised from a well. The moon is a bucket of light. Pet speck of dust, where’s […]
K2 by B. S. Dixon
She smokes to chase the devil that burned her. Burned her chin, chest, neck and hands. Waving her cane, she thinks she finally has him cornered. Car horns and screeching tires, the devil trembles before her, frightened—until that bastard cop pulls her to safety. Later she’ll tell me how she doesn’t want to chase anymore. […]
NO. 4 DOWN: WHAT ROSEMARY IS FOR by Lisa Ludden
101 North is packed. You sit in the passenger seat, impatient for the turn to fields and farmland. Herbed goat cheese, lemon and lavender cookies, thyme loaves of bread. You return to your house overlooking the water. Safe. Resume the daily pitter-patter as you move from room to room, fussing here, fussing there, stopping to […]
Collector by Andrea Blancas Beltran
something I wrote is now lost. it was meant to accompany this photo. something about my grandma. fake pockets in a red coat. something she said about my grandfather’s death. blue balloons & how she’s become such a visual person as she grows into her disease. how I wonder in the wander of her face. […]
Transit by Michael Grant Smith
Review your hardware-store shopping list. Arrange the items into two categories: things you must fix before they break something else, and parts for projects you’ll never start. Stop choosing tools based on whether you think they’ll outlast your span of years. Don’t synthesize memories and likely scenarios as you did last time. Gaze into the […]
Sweater Weather by Cherie Hunter Day, photo by John Levy
It’s finally sweater weather so the saints can recline. They remove their heads like we remove our shoes at the end of the day. The weight of the holy is carried high in the body. Deeds have depth and breadth. It’s no wonder that they’re tapped out—what with fostering all those good intentions, compiling records […]
Practicing Faith by Lissa Staples
He confides in me that his sister goes outside every day and whistles for her dog, even though the animal was stolen over twenty years ago, and that passers-by routinely stop to ask what the dog looks like. She’ll describe a brown canine of no discernible bloodline from a time when she fancied herself a […]
They Need Something More Durable Than Longing and Wine by Charles Rafferty
This is why lovers show off their dog bites and appendectomy scars, the tattooed crosses they have come to regret. They keep them hidden until they can’t, until somebody touches with a tongue the place that used to hurt. After all this time, ink remains the standard medium of love letters. It’s how the future […]
Heads or Tails by Gary Duncan
When it’s his time, the old man with the glass eye doesn’t want much, just dancing girls, a pair of new knees and an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet. If push comes to shove, if he has to choose only one, he’ll settle for the dancing girls. Big girls, like they used to make them. The eye, […]
A rain is waiting to fall for me by Sahith Shetty
A rain is waiting to fall for me, from the edges of store awnings, from the thin branches of trees, from the tips of black umbrellas. It has been seventy six years, and my rain is yet to arrive. Often, as I turn a corner on a crowded street, I look at the clouds that […]
From the Beginning by Douglas Cole
Those were some good words and a good turn out from what I could see. I was distracted by a flood light at the other end of the field where the road picks up. Sorry I couldn’t stay for the finger sandwiches and all those funny stories you told, but this new vehicle shines, and […]
Untitled (Imagine) by Paul-Victor Winters
Imagine being lost at sea, only it’s not a sea and you aren’t lost, just sort of sad. It’s a small town with a hardware store and an empanada shop. You’re either fourteen or fifty-four, but it doesn’t matter. The litter in the street gutter is much the same. Something’s askew in the cosmos. Hint […]
Baby Teeth by Charles Rafferty
O misshapen pearls, O pebbles from the human brook, I summon the rusty taste of you, the pleasure of twisting. You were the first lesson in how nothing lasts, but no one paid attention. Pillow by pillow, we gathered your coins. Whatever we purchased is also gone. Charles Rafferty‘s most recent collection of poems is […]
it is not safe for a woman by Quinn Rennerfeldt
of her age / to appear alone / in public / in the evening / to be nude / in this location / to make eye contact / with a stranger / on a well-lit road / after 8 pm / to be sick / in her generation or / to be outside of the […]
Getting the Message by Larry Smith
I find Chinese writing on the bathroom mirror, a large scroll of a dozen characters. I don’t write or read Chinese, and no one has been here in days. So much of life a mystery, and we the Emperor without clothes. I take the mirror’s photo and text it to Mei, my Chinese friend who […]
On the Edge of Chinatown by Tara Deal
A bit of scaffolding falls off some pink building. A tangerine bag blows up. The report says gusts are going to get worse. A painter at the intersection takes his easel and watercolors inside: ochre, fuchsia, mint green, maybe. I can’t see everything. Someone pulls fake frogs from the pond, that is, pool. One crane […]
Mischief by C G Holder
He is a provocateur; a sly, appraising glance begins the game. He will proposition your wife or goad you to fury with arguments he doesn’t believe. There is no philosophy guiding the provocation; no pricking of pretensions. The aim is simply to kick up hot sparks, to watch them flare and sting in the darkness, […]
⟷ by Mathew Weitman
Once I traveled as rain. It is a sensation that is not easy to describe—but one that is not dissimilar to standing in the center of a two-dimensional depiction of a cube, and facing the implication of a vertex. I found comfort in snow-melt. Sometimes, I’d slide down windowpanes, as discretely as I could—but always, […]
The Art of Prose (With Digressions) by Daniel Nester
Today is the day Melville was describing: rainy, and dark, the end of summer. He would have liked doom metal and free jazz, or said he liked it to friends. All the rebel artists were rich children artists once. They saw close up what these powerful shitcans can do. We are not in the wrong […]
Upper Bunk by Biman Roy
The girl is asleep. Almost diagonally and high up from where I am sitting. Her long legs slightly out of the edge of the bunk. Her body rocks a little as the carriage moves. Outside, the vast body of land, water, and plantations whiz past backwards. Not too many people are around. Some are reading, […]
The Speed of Things by Lisa Dart
That things are so fast now, we find it hard to take them in, though I’m not only talking broadband, breaking news, new builds. Nor any picture, time or space brought to screen on your slick smartphone at running pace. I mean dreams. That come from nowhere like the swans we saw driving back last […]
A Poem about a Poem by Evan Cozad
I’m writing a poem about a poem who wants to be a better dad than his dad was. So, he hops aboard a bus that’s traveling to a Buddhist temple in Indianapolis. There he hopes to find someone to rid him of the demons his father left him. On the bus, the other passengers make […]