In This Issue

Myfanwy Williams

The Women Who Carry I. A woman carries her uterus in a plastic grocery bag floating in formaldehyde, stoppered in a bell jar: inside her, the void sewn tight to stop her organs from migrating, where the blue whales churning in that black hole of hunger have...

VA Wiswell

VA Wiswell VA lives outside Seattle, WA, with her human and animal family. When not writing, she enjoys ice skating, reading, and working on her photography and her art projects. Her work has appeared in Literary Heist, Ignatian Literary Magazine, Five on the...

Frederick Wilbur

Aubade for Aurora Before that late hour of blue cheese and ruddy-skinned pears, white wine, she asks me questions I cannot answer simply: forget night’s history, the weight of excuse? I cannot ignore her briberies of pink and gold. Will...

Stephen Curtis Wilson

Stephen Curtis Wilson Wilson is a designer and photographer. His deeply personal view of this quintessentially Midwestern region, central Illinois, highlights and celebrates its visual textures and curiosities. He was a medical and generalist photographer and...

JL Smith

JL Smith Since visiting Hiroshima, Smith has been reflecting on power: what overpowers, what empowers us to rebuild, and the ruptures that continue across generations following cruelty. What remains in the wake of disaster? How do we reconfigure a world that is...

Jim Tilley

Shadow of a Doubt Light falling against a solid, upright object casts a shadow, the sun setting behind mountains putting the valley fully in shade, no doubt. In the morning, standing against the railing on the balcony of your forest home, the valley...

Sarp Sozdinler

Carcinisation When we were little, my half-brother named all his pets after different animals, which our mom initially thought was a vocabulary issue. His goldfish was called Butterfly. His hamster was named Lizard. The family dog responded to “Rhino,” though only...

Carlin Steere

I stole your handwriting: Dear Elsie, I know it’s been a while since we last connected. It’s been at least 12 years now, bar the occasional Instagram like or Christmas card from your mother. I have something to confess. You might have caught on in the fourth...

Hannah Voteur

Snail Funeral Between tulip and ryegrass there is a freshly dug grave I might be five, or four black soil beneath my fingernails loss in the hollows of my footprints Its viscous body is buried in a bottle cap coffin offered to the earth under flower beds...

P. J. Szemanczky

Returning Home, Teachers Dying swamp trees are irregularly spaced by lynx’s cry answered indifferently well, resigning itself to a natural Providence: self-satisfied. It filled a belly with wild mice several times more vigilant than dying trees, clicking...

Sayantani Roy

Sayantani Roy Sayantani Roy works out of the Seattle area. Her photography and haiga appear in Rappahannock Review and Contemporary Haibun Online.

Shyla Shehan

Because the moon is moving away from Earth 1.5 inches each year I know someday this will all be over. The churning of the tide will soften as her reliable waxing and waning disappears. Infinite gravity governs absolutely. Each action yields equal...

Meggie Royer

Crawlspace Veronica opened the paper bag of tomatoes, inhaling their earthy scent. Big Rainbow, Early Girl, Jubilee. Her favorite, heirlooms, were stacked at the bottom. They always had such beautiful cross-sections. Outside the window, a trail of birdseed stretched...

Michelle Morouse

St. Mary’s Call Room 403 Dr. G. laughed when colleagues refused to sleep in call room 403. The 4 East wing of St. Mary’s once housed pediatrics, then orthopedics, then maternity. They said people had heard things in 403—the rattling of long-gone nuns’ rosaries, a...

Jim Ross

Jim Ross Jim Ross jumped into creative pursuits in 2015 after a rewarding career in public health research. With a graduate degree from Howard University, in nine years, he has published nonfiction, fiction, poetry, photography, hybrid works, interviews, and...

Kaitlyn Owens

Vanishing I wish I didn’t cry at creeping vines forming on bungalows, at bus station lost and found receipts and forgotten gloves. At the 60s spirits smoking Pall Malls in my living room on Sundays evenings in February when the heat kicks on. Old dogs and moth-bitten...

Alice Lowe

Last Dance Take politicians, for example. Some know when to bow out gracefully; others hang on doggedly, even after their health, energy, and mental acuity have begun to compromise their effectiveness. (Sorry, Joe, that includes you.) The time of reckoning seems to...

Mary Ann McGuigan

Sleeping Arrangements On a Bronx fire escape, curled up on couch cushions, desperate for a breeze With my sister in a top bunk that belongs to our cousin, in a room that isn’t ours, in a Brooklyn apartment never meant for us In a bedroom hardly bigger than the bed,...

Miranda Morgan

Between Starbucks and Malibu Yogurt Eight of us sit in Sunset Plaza, sipping our lackluster decaf Americanos a little too slowly, savoring our last few moments outside The Center. The non-caffeinated version doesn’t taste the same as the real stuff, but caffeine is...

Karen Kilcup, Featured Author

Tract Housing, 1950s My father pushes a red mower with swirling blades he sharpens first, scraping a black stone over every spiral edge. His grass is precisely one inch high from top to bottom. I roll in the neat cut, stubble pricks my cheek. Sneeze. Face down...

MFC Feeley

Transfer Long crooked stem, blunt thorns, deep red, tight center, black ridging outer petals that curled back—I forget how I acquired the rose. People were always giving me flowers, but I bought them, too. I could guess a bouquet’s price in any neighborhood, or vased...

Don Farrell

thieves and murderers she gently sacrificed the sparrow eggs under a strawberry moon to a mother and her baby raccoons. just cells in shells, nothing breathing or eating. it had to be hard for her. so soft, her critter loving soul will be haunted until wrens...

Pete Follansbee

Why Thinking About Taxis Makes Me Sad I could never trust an Uber or a Lyft, and I have my own car anyhow. But should I have the need, I’d prefer a taxi with bright colors or checkers and the wide, bulbous car body, as if other car bodies or frames are underneath, so...

Nicholas Haines

Walking Beds Not in any particular direction. But somehow in concert with the other furniture. Me as a boy says to me “Why don’t you stop them?” “The days go by,” I say, praying that this is weighty, meaningful. But I know me as a boy knows that it means as much as...

Deron Eckert

A J. G. Ballard Kind of Gone after Patti Smith The first cool dawn following the unwavering humidity Kentucky summers are known for, a layer of mist containing upwards of a century of morning dew rises eye level from the farm, like fallen soldiers...

Wes Civilz

Self-Portrait as Carefully-Written Poem Each line a soft and velvet shelf upon Which every syllable’s a gem. A notch For each to sit in, snug … ten gleaming swans Perched rung-like on the water’s plane. Now watch How, necklace-like, each gem will sound in turn Its...

Paula Burke

What I Could Have Said Instead “Selfish!” he spat towards me as I stood to leave. “Huh, I wonder where I learned that?” Holy crap, I think to myself. Where did that come from? I mean, it’s true. Dad was selfish and self-centered. Now, his dementia puts him into a...

Benjamin Erlandson, Featured Artist

Benjamin Erlandson Dr. Benjamin Erlandson is the founder of an ecological educational nonprofit fostering bioregionalism, ecological literacy, and stewardship across the biosphere, an outsider scholar following dynamic inquiry to defy disciplines, practicing...

Eileen Vorbach Collins

Chasing Lasers The cat will sit on my desk and help me write stories about love. About loss. About a cat who will claw up the furniture, but I won’t give a damn because she will make biscuits on my poofy belly and never suggest I work on strengthening my core. I know...

Featured Author, Karen Kilcup

Raised in the area the Abenaki people called Quascacunquen, Karen Kilcup is the Elizabeth Rosenthal Excellence Professor Emerita at UNC Greensboro. She is a past president of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers and the Robert Frost Society. Her academic books include Fallen Forests: Emotion, Embodiment, and Ethics in American Women’s Environmental Writing, 1781-1924, which was supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship and was named a Choice magazine Outstanding Academic Title, as was her Who Killed American Poetry?: From National Obsession to Elite Possession. Since 2020, Kilcup has focused on writing poetry and has published in numerous anthologies and journals, including Poetry East, Minnesota Review, and Poet Lore. Her book The Art of Restoration (2023) was awarded the 2021 Winter Goose Poetry Prize, and her chapbook, Red Appetite (2023), received the 2022 Helen Kay Poetry Chapbook Prize. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she has a second chapbook, Black Nebula (2023). The title poem from her second full-length collection, Feathers and Wedges (2024), was awarded the 2022 Julia Peterkin Literary Award for Poetry. She lives in the seacoast of New Hampshire with her partner Alan, in the company of skunks, bobcats, coyotes, foxes, otters, fishers, and bears.

Featured Artist, Benjamin Erlandson

Dr. Benjamin Erlandson is the founder of an ecological educational nonprofit fostering bioregionalism, ecological literacy, and stewardship across the biosphere, an outsider scholar following dynamic inquiry to defy disciplines, practicing systems wisdom. Trained in narrative, photography, filmmaking, and new media production at UNC-Asheville (BA) and Emerson College (MA), he captures multimodal narrative traces in defiance of anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism. He was an NSF IGERT Fellow in Arts, Media, and Engineering at Arizona State University. Recent juried exhibitions of his work include Spanish Peaks Arts Council, Photocentric Gallery, R Gallery, Valdosta State University, Spiva Center for the Arts, Hilliard Gallery, San Fernando Valley Arts & Cultural Center, Yeiser Art Center, Wilson Arts Center, Turchin Center, and Roger Tory Peterson Institute. In 2025, he was a multidisciplinary artist-scholar in residence at Pine Meadow Ranch in Sisters, Oregon. He is a volunteer photographer for the National Park Service on the Blue Ridge Parkway.

Burningword Literary Journal Issue 116 Cover Image

Issue 116, Oct 2025

Featuring: Issue 116, published October 2025, features works of poetry, flash fiction, short nonfiction, and visual art by Paula Burke, Wes Civilz, Eileen Vorbach Collins, Deron Eckert, Benjamin Erlandson, Don Farrell, MFC Feeley, Pete Follansbee, Nicholas Haines, Karen Kilcup, Alice Lowe, Mary Ann McGuigan, Miranda Morgan, Michelle Morouse, Kaitlyn Owens, Jim Ross, Sayantani Roy, Meggie Royer, Shyla Shehan, JL Smith, Sarp Sozdinler, Carlin Steere, P. J. Szemanczky, Jim Tilley, Hannah Voteur, Frederick Wilbur, Myfanwy Williams, Stephen Wilson, and VA Wiswell.