Tess KellyPLAYHOUSE It arrived on a surprise Saturday in the bed of Uncle Tony’s pickup. The wooden playhouse our grandfather built had cedar shakes, a rooster-topped weathervane, and real hinged windows that opened wide like our astonished mouths. Soon enough…
Peter DeMarcoWAR GAMES In the car trip to a Pennsylvania V.A. hospital when I was twelve, my mother told us that our great Uncle Roy was a veteran of World War I and couldn’t communicate anymore. The ride was three…
Sadie Shorr-ParksTWO POEMS Winter on Earth In my bruise blue Subaru with the drooling sunroof rattling down skyline drive. Winter on earth can mean leafless branching, iced asphalt. Headache sunlight ahead: a migraine to match the moment. Winter can be…
Meg PokrassIF YOU WANT TO BE LOVED, LOVE “If you want to be a horse, be a horse.” Her father said this when he talked about the family infrastructure, how weak it was. When she was little, she wanted to…
Rebecca AckermannBIRTHING LESSONS The woman on the screen howls in agony and communion as her partner reaches into the water to grasp their child’s crown and pull him free. They are all three naked, swirling in blood and insides. Sunlight…
Deb FenwickRIDING WEST TOWARD THE WOODS The dandelions in the front yard have the audacity to pop up screeching yellow, blanketing the lawn. I’m crouching, trowel in hand, yanking and destroying. The soil won’t easily yield. But neither will I.…
R. C. BarajasDR. WILLIAM’S FAMILY FIX-U SHOP Youngest Daughter Services and Pricing For Middle Son and Eldest Daughter, see separate price sheets. Limited services available for Eldest Son Overall Assessment of Youngest Daughter………………………$45 Dr. William will give a quick but…
Nathan WillisTHE SOFT ANIMALS There are four deer in the garage. They’re made of metal and they don’t have heads. Mom’s been sneaking out at night when she thinks I’m asleep. This is what she’s been working on. She wants…
Mariana SabinoTHE UNDERCURRENT The Czech woman had returned to the wrong place, that much we knew, and we weren’t about to watch out for anyone, especially this pearl smeared with oil. She arrived in one of the local public vans,…
Luisa LuoSIX RANTS FROM A NASTY YELLOW GIRL One, I am a byproduct of post-colonialism, fortunately and unfortunately. Post-colonialism is my explanation for everything I have been put through from racism to sexism to homophobia to the Red Scare you…
Will MusgroveTHE DRIVE HOME In the distance, black clouds blanket the sky like cake frosting, and streaks of rain shade the warm air. Strong winds jostle my buddy Jake’s rusted sedan, make minor corrections to our trajectory, whisper to us…
Jamie NielsenCONFESSIONS OF A CARELESS CABBAGE PERSON “There’s only one kind of trap that works. It’s the five-for-a-dollar, old-fashioned kind with a spring on a piece of wood.” My sister raises and trains horses in the mountains outside Reno, Nevada.…
Timothy BoudreauLIFE IS TOO SWEET FOR THIS LEVEL OF IDGAF We’re here too short a time to shuffle grumpily to work, we’re missing opportunities. Donny scowls at Mrs. Levinson when she asks him to cash her check in small bills; while…
Maggie MumfordINTUITION 1. An acorn appears. The orb centered on the welcome mat in the curve of the C, the WEL and the OME forming a bracket. I decide the placement is an accident of nature and that this tree…
Damian DressickDECADENCE, ’94 (SOUTHERN) Rounds in quick succession at Café Lafitte in Exile bleed into slave quarters on Iberville. A sofa included in his rent. New Orleans lore. Amyl nitrate. Fan of porn mags spread across the cocktail table, Honcho,…
Mitchell UntchTWO POEMS Twin I I. I had thought we’d said everything we needed to say when you were in the hospital and the nurses were running around trying to figure out how to make you more comfortable. Would you…
Mateo Perez LaraMEMORY REMAINS AS SKELETON The lover: I cut into Mark’s frail // pulled out anxious apologies weathered by silence, we never said much but I come up with shame, loads of Jack Daniel’s sketches of boys he wanted…
Lara MarksteinNO NAME ISLAND In the beginning, in that first month that they’d lived with their uncle on Aorere Drive as kids, Hamish and Kylie passed whole days in the bay. Before Stuart could go on about the cost of…
Rosemary JonesSHADOW WATER This is how I heard the story. The this. The that. The this and that. I was at the hospital with my daughters to visit their grandpa, Geoff, who had fallen playing indoor bowls. One small, ambitious…
Gemini WahhajURGENT When Polly’s father died, she received an outpouring of love from his friends. She was grieving by not taking any calls—no tears, no ceremony, just silence, and a total loss of appetite—but these were international calls, coming from…
Alex Wells Shapiroa rust chewed pipe The glug above my left ear (a rust chewed pipe next to my right arm) manifests as yellow beads welling at my bedfoot ; a neighbor stabs my wall open with the sharp side…
Mike JamesTHIRTEEN POTSHOTS AT THE PROSE POEM An alien lands at a city basketball court at night. He either lands inside a science fiction story or he lands inside a prose poem. ◊ Prose poems are the pulp fiction of…
Poetry by Kelly Cressio-Moeller, reviewed by Dana Kinsey SHADE OF BLUE TREES (Two Sylvias Press) In her debut collection Shade of Blue Trees, Kelly Cressio-Moeller conducts a tremendous chorus of voices that rise in a dirge so mournful and lush…
Luiza Flynn-GoodlettGROWING SEASONS: On Plants and Poetry Like most things, it began with beauty: My first apartment after college overlooked the backyard of several Crown Heights buildings, which had become an unofficial dump with stained mattresses, twisted remnants of recliners,…
Grace EvansSHOW, THEN TELL: Crafting Fiction with Alive Exposition While writing a first draft of a novel, I turned one scene and an economical one-paragraph description of a mother-daughter relationship into seven scenes dramatizing every aspect of their dynamic. Why?…
Interview by Andrea CaswellMAKING EACH STORY ITS OWN: a Craft Conversation with Tony Taddei, author of THE SONS OF THE SANTORELLI Tony Taddei’s debut story collection, The Sons of the Santorelli, is a fast read: the prose is smart and…
Vivian ConanA LESSON FROM MY THIRD-GRADE SELF: On Writing from the Heart I was fifty-two when I chanced upon the bright marigold flyer taped to a streetlight in my Manhattan neighborhood. The Writer’s Voice at the West Side YMCA, it…
Interview by Amy Beth SissonA Conversation with Ann de Forest, editor of the Anthology WAYS OF WALKING (New Door Press) I met writer Ann de Forest many years ago, but during the pandemic we formed a new connection around poetry.…
Fiction by Janelle Monáe, reviewed by Kristie Gadson THE MEMORY LIBRARIAN (Harper Voyager) In her latest album Dirty Computer, songstress and visionary Janelle Monáe sings of a future bathed in the blinding light of a new regime. In a world…
Fiction by Melanie Moyer, reviewed by Michael Sasso THE ORIGINAL GLITCH (Lanternfish Press) “Jesus was a carpenter, King Arthur was an orphan, and Laura was a broke, lonely millennial.” This is how Laura, the artificially intelligent protagonist, is summed up…
Colette ParrisEXTRA CREDIT The three of us together constitute a smidge of impurity in what would otherwise be an unadulterated cup of salt. Not the Himalania Fine Pink Salt that will run you $8.99 for ten ounces at Whole Foods.…
Gregory EmilioODE ON BRAISES (AND ODES) For we, which now behold these present days, Have eyes to wonder, but lack tongues to praise. —Shakespeare, “Sonnet 106,” lines 13-14 “Rhyme,” according to the poet and classicist A.E. Stallings, “is an irrational,…
Gwen MullinsBROOD X Brood X is the largest brood of 17-year cicadas. This brood is found in three separate areas centering around Pennsylvania and northern Virginia, Indiana, and eastern Tennessee. The largest emergence of Brood X appears as adults only…
Amy R. MartinSKATE HAVEN I’m already roller skating when the DJ announces it’s time for a “Couples Skate” and I see the sign light up on the wall next to the clock and the rink lights dim and I feel…
Cristina Trapani-ScottEVEN IN THE DARK 1. You make sourdough bread because it’s easier to focus on the simplicity of water and flour than on anything else. You marvel at how water and flour blended can start life. You think of…
Quinn RennerfeldtA POEM WHEREIN I TRY, AND FAIL, TO IDENTIFY MY TUESDAY GENDER Have you ever been forced ………….to swallow a pill of light ………….………….unguided hands rubbing the tract of your throat ………….to slip it past the chokepoint ………….………….like a…
Louella LesterWHAT MIGHT HAPPEN WHEN YOU’RE STUCK On the fifth day of the heat wave, even though the asthmatic air conditioner is faltering, Char stops going outside. Not to get fresh air. Or to exercise. Or to soak up the…
Michelle RossTHE CONTENTS OF MY EXES’ REFRIGERATORS Andrew It was a mini fridge, so not much. Also, it was college, so mostly beer most of the time until we drank those Heineken, one by one winnowing down to whatever else…
Charlotte MorettiRUNNING ALONE AT NIGHT She chewed on a jagged piece of skin that she had pulled along her thumbnail as she drove, her right wrist dangling limply on the steering wheel. She drove quickly as she snuck glances at…
Robin NeidorfLEAVE NO TRACE the full moon rises in the cleft ……………………………between rock and green-turning- gold on gravel trails twenty miles ……………………..northwest of this circle of stones today’s bootprints start to erode under those traces lie yesterday’s …………………………… …………………………… …………lower…
Jennifer HaydenDESPINA: a visual narrative Jennifer Hayden is a graphic novelist based in New Jersey. She is the author and artist of The Story of My Tits, a graphic memoir about her life and her experience with breast cancer, which…
Candace HartsuykerWHEN YOU’RE THE CONTORTIONIST It happens like this: your sister is skipping with a jump rope, her feet slap slapping the sidewalk. You go into the house to get a glass of water, and when you come back, your…
Philip SchaeferDON’T KICK THE DOG Just last week doves glued to the beach, stuck between physics and chemistry. Beneath the Puget Sound. No guns, no sharks. A simple conundrum. There is a history within history, angles prior to geometry. Names…
Ronda BroatchEVEN THE DOGS The horses hid the day I walked out to pasture to catch my appaloosa. Ferro, eluding the drape of lead rope over his withers. I found him deep in woods I’d never entered, and slipped the…
Lisa LebduskaABLATION Faced with a choice between freezing or burning, my mother chose burning. Her decision surprised me because she hated Florida, where she had never lived, and she hated summers in New York, where she spent July and August…
Eric RasmussenMEANINGFUL DEPARTURES I. McKenzie sees it coming. The party’s host is drunk: she’s laughing loud, touching everyone nearby, gesturing with the knife she’s using to cut whole pickles into spears for bloody marys. McKenzie should say something or take the…
AJ StrosahlN ̓X̌AX̌AITKʷ, 1984 A monster named Ogopogo lived in Lake Okanagan and Sylvester’s father Clyde had once seen it drown a bear, face first. It happened a few years before Sylvester was born, when Clyde was almost a boy…
Jessica KlimeshWALKING ON THE FURNITURE In fourth grade, after Ellee and I learned how thin the crust was, how hot the mantle and core were, how fragile Earth in general was, we spoke in cautious whispers. What if? You think?…
Ann StoneyTHE OTHER SIDE When you wake up in the night, don’t flush or wash your hands. Go straight back to bed. This helps. You’ve been awake on and off. Dreams take the shape of lightning. Exaggerated versions of yourself,…