By: Hunter Hazelton Does he blame the orange for its unpeeling? There’s no scream as he thumbs the thing. The orange receives what’s not asked for like a good victim. It perspires—sweaty & citric, spilling its guts upon my lover’s lips. Devoured. Then there’s me, voyeur, transfixed by his: cocked head— open the great throat of Cronus. Almost pornographic. Common violence. His nails impale skin, unwelcoming as daybreak. He leaves the carcass atop the duvet. What a banal death,

By: Darren C. Demaree sometimes the wound cannot fathom that you must press the number one when you dial out from the free phone & god dammit what if my hands are evil hands & if i dial the number another man another wrong man might show up & end all beauty & burn the house of heaven in her throat & pour more concrete in her eyes so the knife so the cool sharp knife instead of the ringing & a clean exit where once light was swallowed Darren C. Demaree is the author of eightee

By: Hannah Cole an octopus climbs like a ladder, while angelfish flutter in the seaplants. Above your body, coral towers cast shadows. Fish wheel in a cloud. Nearer to the shore, an underwater insect navigates the stony floor on stick-like legs. A squid is piling his head with rocks. That’s because I’m here. A quilt drifts down through the seaweed forest, tracing an x axis while I swim the y. You threw it there yourself, making sure it caught the wind, then put clothes on ove

By: Jason Gabbert It makes me sad, what you’ve become. You stained thick the outside of your irises. You bent over broken feathers on the side of the street. That’s the first time I stop seeing you. A boy playing in gutter rapids near 15th and Brazee: He makes the handheld space pod fly. I seem more concerned than his mother: On her phone. He’s back inside now. Someone said they didn’t have many friends. We read an article about life rife with loneliness, like smoking fifteen

By: William Ross The minutes of this night grow fat and sluggish, leaving a thin trail of wetness in the tangled garden – a tear climbing the face to fall back into the eye. A song sucked out of the air is pulled into the radio and the dead risen from sleep discover they are still dead and, even worse, alone. Between heartbeats there is a moment of not beating, when the eye, in total darkness, still sees but sees nothing. A waste of the senses which long to touch and hold, ta

By: Mary Paulson Leave me silent as the tree that crushes me in the forest and no one can hear but wish me well, wish me bright as a yellow spotted moth. Leave me to dream myself writing in celestial patterns, clear as hieroglyphics— to grieve not, forget not, this knot like gum in my hair. Leave me for another day, a neon fire burning away daytime sky and let the mercurial evening blues arrive again. I’m through whispering entreaties to the old black beasts guarding your hea

By: Clay Hardy Another sand dollar fell. Cracked, cold, and discarded. Shadowed under boardwalks. Listening to echoes of each footstep creak. But eventually surrendering. Tumbling along the tides. Soon forgotten and pulled out to sea. With shadows of gulls soaring above in an orange sunset sky. One last final moment to grasp. And dream of what was left that could still be. Clay Hardy is a fiction writer based in Portland, Oregon. His work has been previously been published by

By: Aubry Snow Dime store diner girl college town slew of drunk idiots babbling ‘bout frats and fears and “Can I have another side of feta?” My grin bloomed like the grease on their faces as they ate. I’m a glutton for observation. Black and white tiles alternating, a grimy, deteriorating vestige of the 50s. Big neon sign a stamp branded to my eyelids, my ugly moon. 12 hour shift, feet cracking, legs fat and swollen. I might have liked some roller blades, bejeweled with bayon

By: Alicia Sometimes Event Horizon Telescope, May 12, 2022 how we always wanted to know what was at the center of it all a sense of generational longing only cured by operatic narrative supermassive black hole shadow glowing ring with cavity puncture from far: brooding, slumberous closer: orange-red smouldering fast spinning silhouette wreath devouring infalling surrounds gas, debris swirling its perimeter as stars slingshot around the rim the interstices between itse

By: Kathryn Hall With the necessary zip pouch for pencils and three-ringed, it balanced on the arm, left, the elbow tucked above the hip. No closed for today possibilities except on the walk to and from. How steadfast the moss filled the letters spelling the names of streets stamped in concrete, soft, as one stepped off the curb. How thoughtful the green canopy above, promising tomorrow, tomorrow, leaf, leaf, a bell so unlike the rattle and shuffle of slam or bunk. Reading th

By: Valyntina Grenier It’s a good thing I’m no Van Gogh Here for an hour here unhinged some neighbor’s friend fresh can snap dust burst stark yellow hollow orphan day snaked through cornsilk coiled in corn flour we spin us in the dust devil of spirits we love we how old we and ankle yet hour till hour(s) ours our ours The feeling second I inhale vapor I want to embrace her get right to her hummingbird zoom our hearts catching take plunder there’s no time to w

By: Erika Seshadri my guest unspools his threadbare comfort before me laid out in imbrication, incomplete dauntless we set to work filling gaps with costume jewels and thrifted memories from a calico dress once pleased with our handiwork my guest collects his prize clinging to succor of plastic, twine, and cloth he returns to the wasteland where he shines Erika Seshadri lives on an animal rescue ranch with her family. When not caring for tame critters or feral children,

By: Josiah Patterson Wheatley Hands smeared red under fingernails the studio window a sigh & sight of birds in the background scolding. Feel the cold heaviness of earth, malleable tender as meat. Wet upon the spinning wheel by thin hands pressed & shaped diaspora of clay. The trickling light feeds the colors, bruised to beige into tools for hungry lips. Across the field hands cracked & calloused flick the sickle shave the flax like hair from their heads a thousand bundled sta

By: Bradley Nordell Who are we but words Bleached torn jeans poets Addicts washed up along a shore Old hippies counting crows Seashell remembrances Dust bowls and days of old Lost time in empty romances. Worlds swept by lonely street light cities Bled under wooden bridge creaking Instruments out of tune and daylight Fading before noon. Those green skies Before the thunder and twisters Before the olden days. We wonder As lost time takes our youth away Sitting in the dusk of tr

By: Eugene Marckx We should have known when he sold his sailboat he couldn’t live there anymore – afraid he might slip off “into the drink” – we should have known One time on the phone he let slip that he’d fallen in the grocery parking lot and needed help to his car “Don’t you have someone nearby you can call?” I was afraid for him – he quit calling then except on my birthday – two days late in a slur so bad I had to play the voicemail over and over to decipher his words I c

By: Melissa Ridley Elmes As a nervy, anxious, maladroit child I chewed my fingernails till they bled, peeling them away layer by layer, then gnawing the cuticles into submission— as though all my anxiety resided there, as though removing that skin would silence the disquiet within. “Leave your poor nails alone,” my mother said, “or you’ll never have pretty hands.” But Alecia on the bus said I was ugly as roadkill, and Angela on the bus said I had a dog’s face, so I was pretty

By: Lily DeWitt ⟟ e main st & n high st day does a trust fall into night’s arms. the city’s stars are its people. ⟟ n high st & northwood ave the sidewalks love the feet that walk on them. i too have an obsession with being useful. ⟟ n high st & patterson ave the man next to me has tattoos wrapping around his legs, like how i wrap myself in shadows. i want to ask him what it feels like to be art. i want to ask him what it feels like to put needle to skin in a

By: Sarah Paley Do you think much has changed since then? The mile markers are still there. In photos they look like plain white head stones – anonymous – like a battlefield in France. The barn is unrecognizable – rehabilitated. Chicken coops are long gone they were always an eye-sore, a problem. Jumping from coop to coop the jagged edge of the tin roof tore your leg from ankle to thigh. They wrapped you in newspaper as if you were a fish. You lay in the back -- in the front,

By: Rachel R. Baum I don’t remember you said, the fork in your veined hand trembled and I think, we are talking about your father, not some stranger. This is you, picking at fried catfish it was what you ordered, but not what you wanted you always get that confused. He worked long hours, you told us made sacrifices on your behalf this is you, gazing up at the pedestal where you placed him long ago. Once, a truth blurted out, a recollection cat-o-nine-tails wrapped

By: Susan L. Leary I often worried when I got the call, I’d be unprepared. But the morning my brother dies, all the good clothes in the house are clean. So I tell myself to get on with it. & later, standing over my brother, I think whoever prepared his body must love what they do. Because he looks so clean. Cleaner, even, than when he’d doze on the couch midafternoons to Hank Williams or Johnny Cash. The fatigue of living wiped from his cheeks. & today, as then, the same stil

By: Joshua Sinel That rain Over there Coming in Will march With tiny feet In soldier rows Clamoring and crowding Pushing and rolling Knees over knees Tiny little diamond feet Tap-tap-tapping bending blades moving along singing the secret soldiers’ song To stop for a moment the rock of rocking chairs on broken floors beyond repair the back and forth the tit-for-tat and all the endless this and that Joshua has had stories published in Quarterly West, Sequoia, the anthology Ame

By: Lindsay-Rose Dykema It was just a (series of) misunderstanding(s) starting with my saying let’s be mono -- a few months later I started flirting with someone you labeled it ‘emotional affair’ but I just figured I’d forgotten to add ‘for now.’ Is monogamy death or paying taxes? (then you should have known it was only for now) death, taxes, and the ennui of never-ending Sisyphus laundry (you won’t be done with it until you’re lying on your deathbed sheets) and the greatest

By: Ed McManis Sometimes I see her ghosts before she does. She’s always looking for light, the outline of miracles, a familiar hand on our shoulders. I don’t believe in what I can’t kill. Division is my religion. Sometimes I have t o lie, tell her that earthy, graveyard smell is from my side of the bed, is my new after shave. Sometimes I tell her we’re the only living ones in the room. Ed McManis is a writer, editor, erstwhile Head of School, and father. His work has appeared

By: Grayson Thompson (thank you Ben Barlow for keeping punk rock alive, being my quarantine preacherman, and for writing “A Part of Me”) my astigmatism scatters the light of her body across the night sky he hits like planets aligning in slow motion each graze makes it hard to breathe without it, I feel the cold of the infinite stars I hope you’re somewhere in the corners of my consciousness softening where the shame lives from there I hope you can see I’m stumbling toward you