In This Issue

Ars Poetica—Bolinas

The days are suddenly shorter; the scent of brisk air when I wake, inviting melancholy tied to winter need. Instinct buried deep, that sunshine and sustenance will soon grow scarce? But there’s comforting memory as well: heat from the fireplace blaze, a...

Stephen Curtis Wilson

Wilson is a designer and photographer. Central Illinois has been his frame of reference for a lifetime. His well-seen perspective provides him with an intimate, unique notion of the artfulness of this region, quintessentially Midwestern. He was a medical and...

Tracey Dean Widelitz

Tracey Dean Widelitz is a published writer, poet, and photographer. She is the author of the published children’s book A Heavenly World. She is a proud mom to two incredibly creative daughters. Her poetry has been published in numerous Wingless Dreamer Anthologies....

James Bradley Wells

House and Universe The single-story house’s flat roof would have been a wondersoaked site to lie and study clearsky starscape, but I remember flatness without below, without above. And I remember, rather than imagine, how bruiseblue regimen of the old, lost...

September 12th

A group of college students takes a stroll the morning after September 11th The stripling season’s light – timeless but tirelessly untrue. No matter – bright is that penultimate geometry felt round a sensible world, To which the goosefleshed credence of morning...

Alex Stolis

Postcards from the Knife-Thrower May 15 Vallejo, CA Magdalena said, let’s forget we’re strangers Let’s talk about ragged breath gasps for air Let’s talk about binding hands Let’s talk about pleasure too deep to describe Let’s talk about exquisite freedom of...

Missing

When she came to live with me, my mother spent most of the day in her green velvet chair, which the movers had placed in the guest bedroom, along with some of her other favorite items – framed photos, her bookshelf, a lamp shaped like a teapot. The rest we put in...

Andy Posner

Going Strong At eighty-one and seventy-eight, Mom and Dad are still going strong. Halfway between twelve and thirteen, Chance, our Beagle, is still going strong. Civilization, at roughly seven-thousand years old, is still going strong. In my dreams an asteroid...

A Message from the Ones Who Fly Above Me

A bird shit on my head today. It was at the bus stop. The shit is black and white. I am on my way to work and— Drop. I like my job. I get to teach people. I get to stand in front of a room. I get the attention. Normally, I wouldn’t get attention. Normally, I was...

How To Identify a Body

In your kitchen, we find three long deep shelves filled with dozens of jars of dill pickles, and in your freezer a half dozen bricks of weed wrapped in cling wrap and tied with string. I think of standing next to you at that counter, a bowl of flour and butter...

Humpty Dumpty

I was in the waiting room of a hospital. Someone burst through from behind the reception desk, making a loud crashing sound. He was in a blue gown, tied in the back, barefoot he ran out, not seeing me, into the street. I screamed, “That’s my son!”. On a cot, he was...

Megan Peralta

As a former newspaper writer and photographer, Megan Peralta often had front-row access to the excitement. For her, the perfect shot is always the unexpected "catch," the moments the naked eye would miss. She and her wife live in the mountains of California...

Jiyoo Nam

Jiyoo Nam, a junior at Korea International School, focuses on art, writing, and film. She creates videos that address social and personal themes, enhancing her skills in scriptwriting, camera usage, and Premiere Pro. Jiyoo is committed to advancing her...

Moriah Hampton

Moriah Hampton teaches in the Writing and Critical Inquiry Program at SUNY Albany. Her fiction, poetry, and photography have been featured in Ponder Review, The Coachella Review, Arkana, Gargoyle Magazine, Poetry South, and other publications. Originally from...

The Thing of the World That I Love Most

Thank you for laughing each time I aver, “Who is Samuel Pepys?” when the Jeopardy category pings “Diarists.” I thank grad school for resurfacings, the tedious pages worth a chilly May, Hampton Court morning around the corner where some costumed King Henry...

Sher Harvey

Sherri Harvey is an educator, freelance writer, photographer, and eco storyteller. She travels the world in search of stories about an environment in crisis and the people, especially women, who are helping to save it. Over the past few years, she has lived...

Amsterdam

Needles glittered on the streets in the soft Dutch dawn, like shards of broken glass catching the light. Children drifted in and out of narrow passageways, their movements sluggish as the canals, like something waiting to drown. Behind the street where Anne Frank’s...

Good Sins

Their fires have spread from sea to the mountains Circle the wagons, our herds have fled Night crackles like a fox Is that a carriage, a hotel, charged with what? The old country is filled with that morning light We look for in paintings with one old tree A clearing...

Queen of Diamonds

The soul of each moment is alive. A living voice, a broken down song. Like an abandoned car in an alleyway, from another life you've lived. Within another's ghost towns. * * * "The most beautiful thing about you, is that you're strong enough to be vulnerable." (Fuck...

Roger Camp

Roger Camp is the author of three photography books, including the award-winning Butterflies in Flight (Thames & Hudson, 2002) and Heat (Charta, Milano, 2008). His work has appeared in numerous journals, including The New England Review, Witness, and The...

Tetman Callis

Tetman Callis is a writer and artist based in Chicago. His stories have appeared in various literary magazines, most recently BULL, Tahoma Literary Review, Elm Leaves Journal, Anti-Heroin Chic, Running Wild Press: Short Story Anthology Vol. 7, and Propagule. He...

no longer personal

Then I did my impression of a drag queen impersonating Ed Sullivan singing T. Rex. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t go over. What a lousy Thanksgiving. Everyone wanted to ‘do yoga.’ But asking Middle-Class white people to take up space seems redundant. Did I make it into the...

Capsule Biography Number 5 – Luisa Guerra

In April of 1968, Luisa Guerra created Eseidra, a board game she says has been played to completion by 11 people over 20 years. This claim has been contested. "No one has ever finished a round of Eseidra," wrote Phillip McKenzie in the gaming journal Squaare. "It is...

Tresha Faye Haefner

What nobody tells you about marriage is It’s blackheads and popping pustules. It's watching someone get old in the shower. Its tweezers and hair in the drain and knowing where the scissors are. It's three hour long fights about what kind of litter to buy at the...

Zack Carson

Slum Archangel The velocity of her fall must have been excruciating / blackout-inducing. Tracing the arc of the angel’s nosedive: deadlift-dropped like Heaven metal and sparking all the way down, uranium-heavy, she would have cleaved the evening sky in two....

J.R. Solonche, Featured Author

Books There are too many. They should be pulped. They should be pulped to make useful things. Cardboard coffins, for instance. I’d like to be buried in unread copies of Moby Dick. Old Photographs I don’t like old photographs. Old...

Glass House Almanac

I cannot vote myself out of this scent. Planting sunflowers, planting children, the same thin place for a woman. A ritual grown from winter’s improbability. Smoke, ice, ancestral fingerprints. Around this cold evidence, planets painted by a noble hand, lanterning the...

As Though Playing in Your Head

I fucked up my knitting in the sauna. The wool fraying with sweat, animal tiring of infrared, birds zorbing like orbs of candles, by me, showering in the dark. Alright, and the dog rotates in the air above my bed in my sleep she knows this is a different day the rest...

The Plum Thief

Dark sunset blooms above my veins, Human valleys in marrow eruption. Amaranthine plum-drip bruises Mark me crimson thief, orchard’s fox. Botanic sangria slither, my throat a pink road, Summer’s death the wine of rot and endings. Plum thief wears mortal wound,...

Anniversary Dinner

Because sweetheart, this life is a born escape artist, a migrating fever, a convict tattooed in invisible ink, without mercy or nostalgia. – Tony Hoagland Dear, you tell me you hope for another 25 years together. You, who used to skew toward ballerina-looking...

Jim Ross

Featured Artist, 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, he has published nonfiction, fiction, poetry, photography, hybrid, interviews, and plays in over 200 journals on five continents in ten years. Illustrative writing publications include Columbia Journal, Lunch Ticket, Hippocampus, The Atlantic, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, and Typehouse.

Jim has published photos in many journals, including Bombay Gin, Burningword, Camas, Cold Mountain Review, Feral, Friends Journal, Phoebe, and Stonecoast. Jim particularly enjoys using photos (or other images) and text together to tell stories. Jim’s photo essays, most incorporating text, include DASH, Kestrel, Litro, New World Writing, Roanoke Review, Sweet, and Typehouse. Essays incorporating images from old postcards have been published in Amsterdam Quarterly, Barren, Ilanot Review, and Litro. He especially recommends his stories in Kestrel and Sweet. For Typehouse, he wrote a short craft essay on approaches to creating photo essays.

He recently wrote and acted in a one-act play. Based on writing a particular non-fiction piece, Jim made multiple appearances in a documentary limited series broadcast domestically and internationally. The upcoming publication he’s most excited about is an interview with artist and chef Anne Flash in Terrain Magazine. Jim and his wife—parents of two health professionals and grandparents of five—split their time between the city and the mountains.

Featured Author, J.R. Solonche

Nominated for the National Book Award, the Eric Hoffer Book Award, and three times for the Pulitzer Prize, J.R. Solonche is the author of 40 books of poetry and the co-author of another. He lives in the Hudson Valley.

Issue 114, Apr 2025

Featuring: Issue 114, published April 2025, features works of poetry, flash fiction, short nonfiction, and visual art by Virginia Barrett, Julie Benesh, Alyssa Blankenship, Alex Braslavsky, Vikki C., Tetman Callis, Roger Camp, Zack Carson, John Colburn, Ben Guterson, Tresha Faye Haefner, Moriah Hampton, Sher Harvey, Penny Jackson, Carella Keil, Sam Kerbel, Amy S Lerman, Valentine Mizrahi, Christian David Loeffler, Judith Mikesch McKenzie, Jiyoo Nam, Megan Peralta, Andy Posner, Jim Ross, Beth Sherman, J.R. Solonche, Alex Stolis, Maxwell Tang, James Bradley Wells, Tracey Dean Widelitz, and Stephen Curtis Wilson.