In This Issue

J.M. Emery

Ode to T-Pain Like an octopus crowning itself with mollusks you took pains to hide your beauty. Auto-tuned a voice that needed no tuning, that sounds clear and honest as winter on the nape of the neck. Often, if not always, we ask angels to play the kazoo. To suffice....

Jean Wolff

  Jean Wolff Jean Wolff has had group and solo exhibits in various galleries in New York City and internationally. In addition, she has published 154 works in 105 issues of 61 magazines. Born in Detroit, Michigan, she studied fine arts at the Center for Creative...

Rome Smaoui

The Tender Earth Our mothers die quickly. When we grieve, time rushes out of us like old light. They lowered the body into the black end of the ground. All the worms turned, delighted. The sun threw itself on the dirt like a lover returning. I couldn’t help but sink...

Jessie Wingate

My Body, Your Choice Chromatic prism, ultraviolet light waves toward my flat black pupil a record shuffling the same few songs. Isn’t that what womanness has been about? Repeated scenes: the bonnet-donned bonnie forking at the hay bail the fish wife catching her baby...

Stephen Curtis Wilson

  Stephen Curtis Wilson Wilson is a designer and photographer. Central Illinois has been his frame of reference for a lifetime. His well-considered perspective provides him with an intimate, unique understanding of the artistry of this region, quintessentially...

VA Smith

Wheels It began in our bodies, parts of us craving release, the Let It Go of Elsa’s icy power, the freedom of her frozen solitude. You, car-seated chanteuse, fresh from Montessori Pre-K, I, your chauffeur grandmother joining you in a ramped-up CD sing along, chanted...

Dylan Willoughby

Dylan Willoughby Dylan Willoughby’s photography has appeared in On the Seawall (10-photograph feature), Wrongdoing, Rejection Letters, and many other venues. Dylan has been a residency fellow at Yaddo and MacDowell and holds an MFA from Cornell.

Lucinda Trew

Huck at the altar of drainage culverts twice a day he leans into concrete tunnels that run beneath driveways, trusting in what waits amid wet leaves, grass clippings, the effluent of suburbia - he is a true believer, a witness who recalls a raddled tabby within one...

Lisa Lopez Smith

Exhalations untethered from my daydreams my husband says ¿Que te pasa? ¿Por que tanto suspiro? it’s even a joke now—my fictional characters respond to every line of dialogue with sighs. Like me. We’re illegible, scrawling out the only possible response, knee-deep in...

Dana Stamps, II

Why I Hate to Read Trimming a bonsai tree is probably better entertainment. Listening to good music, from classical to jazz to rock-n-roll, is so much better that I cannot overestimate the difference. Watching television is even more addictive nowadays with YouTube’s...

Thomas Vogt

  Thomas Vogt Thomas Vogt is an aspiring poet, photographer, and city planner in Sacramento, California. He enjoys capturing the ‘every day’ through a pen, a lens, or behind a mug at your local coffee shop. His work has been published or is forthcoming in Radar...

Dave Sims

Dave Sims After decades of teaching writing and literature, Dave Sims now makes art and music in the mountains of central Pennsylvania. His paintings, comix, stories, and poems appear in nearly one hundred tangible and digital exhibits and publications, including...

Susan Shea

Zigzags If I knew Socrates told us to question everything I would have been better equipped to tell my mother why I disagreed with her why I lacked her enthusiasm for being born with curly hair that went in every direction off the top of my head like a field of unruly...

Juan Pablo Mobili

The Pilosity of Memory  Although mindful to remember but unwilling to commemorate, during our nation’s holidays,   during grade school, I carried our flag, hoping it would end my parents’ wars.   That might be why I still gaze at armies with suspicion, why...

Arthur Pitchenik

The Dreamer’s Nightmare I was frantically seeking asylum in a land renowned for kind-hearted Giants but found horror instead. The Giants were “cleansing their land of all lesser life," maniacally self-replicating and seeking immortality to “last forever.”  A Supreme...

Timothy L. Rodriguez

Hee Haw We walk where the blade talks high wire of a divide between schemes of dreams and the certain verdict in the capital trial called living   All walks punish with wishes We wander dead ground a travail through felled trees of knowledge   The hee in the...

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 plays in...

Joseph Landi

Bodies We found them rolled together in a sack, soaked by runoff at the bottom of a grass embankment. Tossed from a car, no doubt. We peeled them apart and laid them on a bare log in a skinny roadside copse to dry. We were nine with little idea of what we beheld;...

Bethany Jarmul

I’ve Spent My Life Separated from Living Separated by doors, windows, walls— swallowed by digital throats, settled into a stomach where I collected friends and hearts like stamps.   I’m not sure what I want on my gravestone, but I know it’s not: Comfortable...

Zoé Mahfouz

Jellicle Song For Jellicle Clint  Not long ago, after I started devouring my Chicken McNuggets, this old man, who by the way I’ve never met in my life, tells me that normally food is forbidden inside the cinema, so my first thought is oh, he must be hungry with all...

Mary Dean Lee

Grass and Marble There’s a harmonica in my pocket, a spider crawling out of my mouth and on my backside a lovely long tail that’s been hiding, tucked in my pants. Instead of arms I have wings lacy but strong. Out of my belly button three or four babies spill out,...

Madeline Eunji Lee

Madeline Eunji Lee Madeline Eunji Lee is a freshman at the Spence School in New York. She is deeply interested in enhancing everyday life through art and design. By closely observing ordinary scenes—like crosswalks or school fields—she seeks to view them through an...

Alaina Hammond

I Hear You Like My Work Yesterday I received a text from an unknown number. “Hi! I hear you like my work!” I immediately knew who it was. Or rather, who it was pretending to be. It’s so creepy that the robots in my phone can tell what I’ve been reading. Even when it’s...

Mathieu Fournier

Mathieu Fournier Mathieu Fournier is a French visual artist based in Paris. His work explores transitional spaces—between the real and the imagined, the intimate and the collective—through photography, digital art, and painting. He creates visual metaphors of...

Veronica Scharf Garcia

Veronica Scharf Garcia Veronica Scharf Garcia has exhibited extensively in South Florida, California, New Jersey, and Peru. She was awarded four residencies as an associate artist at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, New Smyrna, Florida, and the Deering Estate in...

Marcy Rae Henry

francis bacon’s black mouths: a love poem painted over and over because he wanted to perfect blackness in different states of mouthness the black before the scream i’ve printed ‘em to put over the bed folded into origami orgasms as if doing squats over a speed bump...

Louis Faber

This is Kansas, Toto There is a two-headed man living just outside Topeka who rarely goes into town. On Friday nights quite late he’ll wander into the roadhouse and order two Heinekens. He’ll draw the odd stare, but as long as he puts a twenty on the bar the drinks...

Todd J. Donery

Todd J. Donery Todd J. Donery is a Minneapolis-based freelance photographer, photo assistant, camera operator, and stagehand. He earned his degree in photography and digital imaging at Minneapolis Community and Technical College. He has also attended Minneapolis...

Laurence Carr

George’s Boys, 1960 The leather jacket boys hung out at George’s Texaco and could put away a six-pack of Iron City, Duke or Schlitz in record time, but Rolling Rock, on the other hand, was considered a queer beer that was lifted or purchased as a last resort when a...

Marina Carreira

Thumbprints and Tree Rings   Are basically the same, yeah? Circular markings on living beings that show we originate from one genius source, one brilliant astral scientist who saw the stunning in all creation and said, I think I’ll leave them symbols of their...

Lisa Delan

Trauma, according to Webster's "An injury caused by an extrinsic agent or behavioral state resulting from considerable mental disruption and duress; acute physical suffering or emotional upset inflicted by a mechanism or force that causes trauma." I've spent years...

Angela Townsend, Featured Author, Issue 115

Angela Townsend is in her eighteenth year of working at a cat sanctuary, where she gets to bear witness to mercy for all beings. This was not the exact path she expected after divinity school, but love is a wry author of lives. She is a five-time Pushcart Prize nominee and the 2024 winner of West Trade Review’s 704 Prize for Flash Fiction. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, Blackbird, Five Points, Indiana Review, The Iowa Review, Pleiades, and SmokeLong Quarterly, among others. She graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary and Vassar College. Her poet mother is her best friend.

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Holly Willis, Featured Artist, Issue 115

Holly Willis is a writer, filmmaker, and photographer whose work examines the materiality of the image within a broader context of new materialist philosophy and the histories of experimental film, video, and photography with the goal to design encounters with media that spark an embodied sense of curiosity and wonder. Using a variety of analog, digital, and computational image-making tools, Willis explores the ways in which we might reimagine our relationship to the world and its varied spaces and landscapes, not as independent beings moving through separate realms, but as transcorporeal forces enmeshed in dense relationships with the matter all around us. She asks if we can imagine the world not as some inert backdrop to human activity but as a dynamic array that we engage with in ongoing relations, how might we care for our world differently? Her body of work overall attempts to capture this sense of active matter, of sensation, and dynamism, and strives for what Anna Tsing, in The Mushroom at the End of the World, calls the “arts of noticing.”

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Print & Digital Issues

Burningword Literary Journal Issue 115 Cover Image
Featuring: Issue 115, published July 2025, features works of poetry, flash fiction, short nonfiction, and visual art by Christina Borgoyn, Cyrus Carlson, Laurence Carr, Marina Carreira, Kimmy Chang, Lisa Delan, Todd J. Donery, J.M. Emery, Louis Faber, Mathieu Fournier, Veronica Scharf Garcia, Alaina Hammond, Marcy Rae Henry, Bethany Jarmul, Joseph Landi, Mary Dean Lee, Madeline Eunji Lee, Zoé Mahfouz, Juan Pablo Mobili, Arthur Pitchenik, Timothy L. Rodriguez, Jim Ross, Susan Shea, Dave Sims, Rome Smaoui , Lisa Lopez Smith, VA Smith, Dana Stamps, II, Angela Townsend, Lucinda Trew, Thomas Vogt, Holly Willis, Dylan Willoughby, Stephen Curtis Wilson, Jessie Wingate, and Jean Wolff.
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