In This Issue
Stacy Rollins
What Are These Things? Do you feel the letters in your mouth like bones of a fish, the spine of sense caught on the hook of your mind that prods and pokes: a palpable delicacy, hard-palatable, yet slippery through the teeth? Loquacious L, lascivious and limning...
Megan Wildhood
Motherhood Before she readies herself, the woman smooths skin-colored color on her new baby’s forehead, nose, cheeks, jaw, chin, neck. She blends and contours, then the woman brushes rouge on her new baby’s cheeks until they appear to burn. The...
Zebulon Huset
Drawn Upward into a Vague Melody of Harsh Threads* or strings smoothed by horsetail over hours, roughened by grind of canine teeth gnashing first chin polished wood or breath sent to wrench muscles, to shake all adjacent air like the molecules themselves...
Sarah Barbo
Nuns & Spoons We hold our cards in front of our mouths to hide the smiles. Draw, check your hand, discard. Keep an eye on the line of spoons. Tonight I'm the only kid still awake, surrounded by my mom, aunties, grandma, and my great-aunt, who is a Catholic nun....
Lesley Hart Gunn
The Haunting of Winter People Patches of flattened brown grass like those that would peek through snow, a mid-March yawning into spring. Dust motes masquerading as silver snow trickling from above. Dendrites settling without shivers . The...
Matt Zambito
An Awful Way “Have you ever imagined what it might feel like to pee in perpetuity on the outie bellybutton of the first or worst person to shatter the mirror of your heart?” would be an awful way to start a poem, when one should really begin (why not,...
Judith Shapiro
I’ll Be Prom Queen Someday I’ll be outspoken, ballsy, articulate, funny. Totally cool, like Fran Lebowitz, but without the cufflinks. Also, I’ll be slow talking, soft talking. I’ll think before I speak. A person others feel okay around, feel good around, want to be...
Mark Hendrickson
Janitrix My college janitor always listened to me, so I confided in her. She was on her knees scrubbing floors but stopped to look straight at me. ‘Why haven’t you done it then? Why haven’t you killed yourself yet?’ I found myself sputtering. I said I wasn’t sure. I...
John Walser
The ceremonies of winter Like hunching. Like watching the spellcast rhythm the narcotic swing of the almost empty feeder. Like black tea with honey. Like February opening the homemade sauce frozen at first frost hint and tasting September. Like turning on the...
Jean Wolff
Jean Wolff has had group and solo exhibits in various galleries in New York City and internationally. In addition, she has published 178 works in 124 issues of 64 magazines. Born in Detroit, Michigan, she studied fine arts at the Center for Creative Studies in Detroit...
Daniel Moon
Daniel Moon is a third-culture city dweller, traveller, and avid photographer fascinated by how cities look and feel. Daniel’s photography often focuses on one of the most ordinary features of city life: stairs. He finds them striking yet unsettling. Their lines and...
FruitAndNut
FruitAndNut is a mother-daughter creative collaboration between Moira Peckham (Fruit — they/them), a writer of fiction, poetry and nonfiction working across public institutions, ocean ecology and science fiction, and Hilary Saner (Nut — she/her), a mixed-media artist...
Grace Lynn
Suddenly We Disability, a tense steel umbilical cord plucking its steady one note of need, coupling us outside the palace of your uterus, in emergency rooms where my wheelchair bullies clocks to rewind until I am suddenly we, blind labor linking...
Stephen Curtis Wilson
Wilson is a Central Illinois–born and –based designer and interpretive regionalist photographer. His photographs provide an authentic glimpse of the character and culture of the region. He was a communication specialist, executive writer and a medical and generalist...
Tom Gdisis
Tom Gdisis is an award-winning photographer who honed his visual eye during a long career in broadcast television. Now retired, he expands his creative output through photography, poetry, and flash fiction. His artwork was selected for the cover of Beyond Words...
Virginia Doré
The Auction The house is not a home. It takes takes takes. It shakes the presumptuous hag stuck there glued in place by poor decisions. Strangles with antique trunks of keepsakes she can’t keep for her sake, the unused KitchenAid, and the damn forsythia shrubs...
Ryo Kajitani
Ryo Kajitani is a queer artist and art model based in Tokyo. Kajitani studied oil-based woodblock printmaking at Tama Art University (2010–2014) and completed a doctoral program in Art and Design there (2019), studying under the late art historian Kunio Motoe...
Gilbert Arzola
Quarters at the elementary school for 25 cents a week in 1959 they’d bring you a carton of milk every day at 2pm. a mid-afternoon pick me up for twenty 2nd graders who sat dutifully at their wooden desks between math and geography, taking the slow steps to growing up....
Esther Zhang
Esther Zhang is a junior at The Winsor School in Boston, Massachusetts. Her writing has been recognized by the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, The New York Times, and Longfellow House. Beyond writing, she enjoys experimenting with digital and film photography,...
S.E. Wilson
Potato Patch The rocks were slick and he carefully made his way along them. He wasn’t as agile as he was as a child and he stepped with care. There was a light breeze and the sounds of chickadees and the steady whoosh of the water seemed to be all around him. That...
VA Smith
Self-Portrait as Sisyphus with Litter Pickers To love a city is to know its street trash. Our new neighborhood burps it up hourly, population quadrupled by condos crawling up overnight, humans and heavy machinery making mayhem with mud, Tastykake wrappers, cans...
David J. Schast
Swimming on Coffee Tables Édith Piaf’s quivering vibrato on “amour” tickles the back edge of my hearing tonight as I watch my five-and-a-half-year-old friend on her belly, atop our coffee table swimming in her colorful stretchy pants— a pink-legged turtle doing...
Valy Steverlynck
Mother A sac to dump monsters, ghosts and dark devils. Your daughter calls you to empty her fears. Slippery grime that lines her young organs, you sag under the weight of her dread. To think you were womb that held her lightness– she lentil at 6...
Stefan Sofiski
Surprise, Surprise Maria placed her caramel latte next to the corpse and cracked the window. Light seeped into the basement generously, interrupted by people’s legs treading on the pavement. Morning freshness diluted the air of chemicals. Maria rolled her shoulders...
Romana Iorga
[Everything is close] After Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours (III, 20) Everything is close today, the watery glow from the daffodils blooming on the balcony, the wind inflating the green sail of the curtain, the neighbor’s dog yapping again at a passer-by....
Sylvie Oleta
Terminus Rotgut I have the recording scratched bloody as a red record groove into my body, the totality of my body, a needle sending resonant, flowing memory through every vein, cut in rows, scratched, recorded and played, scratched recorded and played, the blood...
Roger Camp
Roger Camp is the author of three photography books, including the award-winning Butterflies in Flight (Thames & Hudson, 2002). His documentary photography has been awarded Europe’s prestigious Leica Medal of Excellence and published in numerous journals,...
Natalia Danjon
Natalia Danjon is a writer based in the UAE. When she is not writing, Natalia expresses her creativity through photography with a keen interest in color and light. Her work has appeared in Black Fox Review (Japan), Every Day Fiction (Canada), Molecule Literary...
Roberta Winters
Roberta Winters was born and raised in New York City and now lives in Sacramento, California. She attended Hunter College/CUNY, Macaulay Honors College and the University of Washington, Seattle Creative Writing MFA program. She is a writer, photographer, and artist....
Merie Kirby
I am not the housewife of perfection Saturated with gin and academic takes on subjectivity I sit surrounded by summer sunflowers and the cosmos I sowed beside the patio and wonder how to continue in a body, in a world, that does not think it needs this body, even as...
Lisa Christina St John
Wonder Forgives The nice thing about not knowing what you planted is that you never know what you’re going to get. In the moment I order bulbs or seeds (I’ve given up on vegetables), I am certain I will remember where they go. But every year I plant pollinator...
Elizabeth Rosen
A Woman Walking Not Alone dreams of marmalade cake and silk throw pillows to lean upon, to rest her swollen ankles when she comes home from stocking Aisle Two of the local WaWa, a bus, two blocks walking, and a second bus away. A woman walking not alone hears in the...
Josh Price
The Collector I like walking. I can think about things that need thinking about. I found a workaround, by the way, I got tired of death taking everyone I loved, so I started collecting. There’s nothing death can do about it except take me away, too, and even then, I...
Kathryn Temple
While You Are in the ICU I Cannot Write I cannot dredge up words, blue suitcase stuffed with dirty clothes, hotels and more hotels, 3 cities in 3 weeks, every morning up early and off to the ICU, where sometimes you eat a bit of what I bring. A night of...
Carella is a writer and digital artist who splits her time between the ethereal world of dreams and Toronto, Canada, depending on the weather. Her work involves themes of mental health, nature, and sexuality, often in a surrealist tone. Many of her short stories jigsaw together into a magical realism narrative, and she is currently working on the connective tissue for a fiction collection. Her debut poetry collection, Undercover Butterfly, was published in May 2026 by Dark Thirty Poetry Publishing and is available for purchase. She is the 2023 Door is a Jar Writing Award winner in nonfiction and the Fall 2025 Cardinal Sins first-place award recipient in fiction. She has received multiple nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net and is the featured artist for the Fall 2024 issue of Blue Earth Review. Her work previously appeared in Burningword 104 and 114, and in numerous literary journals including Columbia Journal, BULL Lit Mag, Berkeley Fiction Review, Ponder Review, Wizards in Space and Tangled Locks. Her art is featured on the covers of over a dozen literary journals, including Glassworks Magazine, Nightingale and Sparrow, Cosmic Daffodil, Silk Road Review, In Parentheses, and Straylight Magazine.
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Linda K Allison finds everything more interesting with a camera in her hand. A recovering banker, Linda now spends her time writing short stories and pursuing her passion for photography. Linda considers herself an “eye photographer.” She sees the shot wherever she goes and enjoys exploring her subjects from unique perspectives. It’s not uncommon to find her on the ground or in other unusual, occasionally alarming positions, seeking the perfect photograph. In 2019, Linda decided to travel without her Canon SLR and the heavy assortment of lenses she was accustomed to. Instead, she shot a ten-day trip to Portugal with nothing but her iPhone. She’s never looked back. The pictures in this issue of Burningword Literary Journal were taken with an iPhone 17 Pro and an iPhone 13 Pro. You can typically find Linda among the trees in The Woodlands, Texas, where she lives with the love of her life.
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