April 2026 | nonfiction
The Valley
The roads were full of craters, little divots grown wide by snow melt and balding tires clunk-clunk-clunking. There was a gravity to the town felt in even the smallest of valleys. This gravity kept feet planted behind the counter of one of the many Pizza Bellas. Even when teachers used the word “brainiac”, even when there were AP classes on the books and a brain that could remember, down to the millisecond, when someone important was assassinated.
Large pie special with two XL liters of Pepsi, $19.99, 45 minutes to an hour,
delivery or pickup, wings by the half-pound or pound.
A slew of Kennedy’s had come and gone, but this became the language of being, the real memorization in milligrams (Percocet), slices, minutes, pounds.
Some went to college. Counselors had pamphlets and muffins for a few quarters. It was a relief if they didn’t OD or drop out. There were a few moments when gravity would unclasp the youngest and brightest, long enough for them to go to one of the two colleges down the street for something like business or education. They absorbed their parents’ businesses or their old classrooms. The two who were suspected to become lawyers did. Some moved away, some never really arrived.
A high school built to stand two hundred years only makes it one hundred and eight. The chips each year took out now clearest in the rubble of what was an auditorium, classrooms, a few gargoyles on the perch. There was a champion team time and time again, in a century of sweat and shouts.
There was another option. It involved the military or the police, either recruited or disrupted by. Then, somehow, back at the pizza shop. There’s one on every corner.
A little dream dying the second it’s born, a rubberband snapping back to form.
Caroline Hayduk
Caroline Hayduk is a poet, editor, and educator. She holds an MA and MFA in Poetry from Wilkes University. She has been published in The Penn Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, Santa Fe Writers Project, and others. Night Bones is her debut chapbook. She is a full-time instructor of Writing at Luzerne County Community College and lives with her boyfriend/book designer, Eric, their two cats, and millions of trinkets.
April 2026 | nonfiction
Dreamscape
Trailing behind my partner Arnie and friend Tom, I ski toward Dreamscape lift down Déjà vu, an intermediate Park City run well within my skill set; I’m 69 with 35 years of experience under my parka although certainly not an expert. The air is afternoon crisp but my hands and toes are toasty thanks to my heated gloves and boots. I carve turn after turn after turn and hear my edges digging into the hard pack. The snow is slick. My mind wanders for a moment, a daydream maybe, and I miscalculate a turn. OHHH SHIIIIIIIT! I veer off the groomed terrain, impale my skis in a mogul, flip out of the bindings, catapult airborne, then land on my stomach and slide twenty feet down the hill. Somewhere along the way I hear a muffled crack. I let go of my ski poles, still oddly clenched in my hands, and roll over onto my back. I shake, shake, shake in shock. My right leg feels limp. Tom yells from below, “Can you get up or should I call ski patrol?” “Ski patrol,” I yell back. Pain begins to throb deep in my leg. The metallic taste of fear coats the inside of my mouth. Will my knee still bend? I don’t dare test it. I shake, shake, shake and I can’t make it stop! “Breathe,” I tell myself. “Breathe.” A panic attack will not help. I try to steel myself—such a weird expression. I think about Arnie who is likely at the lift and wondering where I am. Did she take a little tumble and have trouble getting up? Soon, the ski patrol will arrive with their tools and toboggan. I’ve watched them rescue other skiers after crashes and wipeouts and felt grateful I was upright. Now I will be their cargo, one of the fallen, wrapped in a blanket and ferried down the hill. I close my eyes and I wait, wishing, wishing, wishing this was all a dream.
Sharon Goldberg
Sharon Goldberg is a Seattle writer whose work has appeared/is forthcoming in The Gettysburg Review, The Citron Review, New Letters, The Louisville Review, Cold Mountain Review, River Teeth, Green Mountains Review, The Southern Indiana Review, The Lost Balloon, Best Small Fictions, and elsewhere. Sharon won second place in the On the Premises 2012 Humor Contest and Fiction Attic Press’s 2013 Flash in the Attic Contest. She is an avid but cautious skier and enthusiastic world traveler.
April 2026 | nonfiction
Relief Valve
It’s February and the power company is working on our building’s main heating line. We sit in our living room with big sweaters and pants and socks and sip tea, watching our breaths merge with the steam until we can’t tell which is which. Maybe it doesn’t matter—we’re all burning inside, anyways, while oxygen slowly combusts in our lungs. Sometimes I hear it crackle if the room is silent, but that’s only at 2am, when the metro stops running and the highway quiets. When all the people get to wherever they’re going. To wherever home is. I think people are always trying to get home however they can, the businessmen on the train and the junkies in the street, we’re all the same. We all take whatever bus comes first.
We live on the top floor of an 80-year-old apartment building. I didn’t know this before, but in old apartments, when they do work on the central heating, air pressure builds up at the tops of the pipes. They have to let it out with a tiny key that they twist into the gut of our radiator until water spurts like they hit an artery. I hover in the hallway while they clean up the mess and wonder whether I should ask them if they want something to drink. I’m not quick enough—they nod and head out, and then we have heat again. At least for a while. I’ve been finding comfort in things like these since you left: awkward interactions with handymen, not having heat, having heat again. Sometimes I’ll even smoke with the window wide open—but that’s nothing new, you’d say.
We turn the heat all the way up and finish our tea and sweat through our sweaters. The radiator burns if you touch it with the fleshy part of your palm, like I did to see if it was on. To check that they hadn’t only pretended to fix something that couldn’t be fixed. These aren’t metaphors—I think life just has a funny way of sticking the same thing under your nose over and over again, as if to say “look, this is what I meant.” I keep telling life “I understood you the first time,” but it’s no use. Life is busy going home and I’m getting older and you’re still dead. It’s too hot in our apartment. But listen: outside, it’s starting to snow.
Dara Goodale
Dara Goodale (they/them) is a Romanian-American queer multigenre writer and university student living in Lausanne, Switzerland. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Hayden’s Ferry Review, the American Poetry Journal, ANMLY, Cleaver Magazine, Thimble Literary Magazine, Sky Island Journal, and more. Dara is a Pushcart nominee and was a finalist for the Gasher Press 2025 Bennett Nieberg Transpoetic Broadside Prize. You can find them on Instagram @daragoodale and online at daragoodale.com
April 2026 | nonfiction
Pockets
When my firstborn son Benjamin attended morning preschool, his grandma picked him up afterwards, and they spent afternoons together while I worked. On my birthday, the year he was 3, Benjamin asked his “Gamma” for white fabric. He cut out four jagged cotton squares, enlisting her help to stitch each pair together on three sides. On the open sides, he clipped safety pins to the corners.
When I arrived to pick him up, he danced around the room, blue eyes alight, clutching a package wrapped in crumpled green paper with too much tape. “I made it for you, Mom, and it’s a surprise! Happy Birthday! Open it now!”
I tore open the wrapping paper and pulled out the squares, both decorated in marker with clumsily drawn flowers and designs, my full name inscribed on the front of each one by his grandma. A fabric birthday card covered in red hearts accompanied the gift – twenty hearts in all, outlined by Gamma, painstakingly colored in by Benjamin.
“They’re pockets, for you!” he exclaimed, grinning and bouncing in place. “See, you can pin them on your shirt and you’ll always have pockets to put stuff in! And they’re portable pockets, so you can move them when you change your clothes! See?”
I sat down to pin the pockets onto my dress, moved by the tenderness of his gift, admiring his ingenuity. When I stood to model the new pockets, I asked, “Whose idea was this?”
Delight shone on his face, and Gamma nodded, as he declared, “It was my idea! Gamma just helped!”
Benjamin died suddenly on New Year’s Day when he was 23. Today I stroke the worn cotton pockets in my lap, tracing the marks made by his small hands, marveling at his loving creativity, longing. If only I could have tucked Benjamin inside these pockets like a baby kangaroo, protecting him from harm.
Lucinda Cummings
Lucinda Cummings is a writer and retired psychologist who lives in Minnesota. Her essays have appeared in Hippocampus, The Baltimore Review, Woven Tale Press, Glassworks, and other journals and anthologies. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and listed as “Notable” in Best American Essays 2023. She is working on a memoir about erasure.
April 2026 | nonfiction
Log Book. Camp Mystic, Kerrville, Texas. Northern Hemisphere, Planet Earth
Texas lawmakers failed to pass a bill to improve local disaster
warning systems this year. . . Texas Tribune. July 6, 2025.
July 10th, 2025—173 children still missing along the Guadalupe River, Texas Hill Country:
We bet on our chances down to the last community card we call the river, playing Texas Hold’ Em. We spoke in a hush how the nature of any river is to rise if there be a notion to rise, and we watched on TV how the Guadalupe rose up and ravaged everything—the clouds just pouring out a beast. No warning shot or godly thought for us, the parents hobbled, waiting and crouched by their phones for a word. Cabins and trees in flood alley washed away, hands grasping edges, branches, rocks, and then there was us the next morning, the next night still alive in our usual aliveness but clinging to our crosses and submerged in our minds with the children, clawing with them to breathe, rise from the cresting water, keep their heads above for god’s sake as long as they could, for god’s sake may the legion of angels have lifted their souls out of their blameless bodies before the hypoxia strangled, before those of us left behind warbling the cosmos wracked our senses to make it make sense, to find redemption for our gods and our savage governance—no emergency alerts, no disaster response; sirens drowned in the fellowship halls and house bills of mammon. Is it all on us, every loss for Christ’s sake, isn’t there a trail to the highlands of some verdant loveliness? For holy sake, bring us a map and compass, a chance to behold, all the missing children blossoming from the Guadalupe to Gaza to Iran to Sudan and the sons of Russia sent to slaughter. There’s got to be a path, a second chance, a field the children are playing on, their wizard hats and healing balm flashing under the moon, is this what they chose to do for the sake of us, for our unfolding consciousness, once upon a time before time and Camp Mystic, then to the river, then to the radiant fields of lantana where they must be, must, they must have.
Robin Carstensen
Robin Carstensen’s work is recently published in RiverSedge and many more. Club Plum Lit also recently published and nominated her flash for a Pushcart Prize, 2024. Her chapbook In the Temple of Shining Mercy won first-place and was published by Iron Horse Literary Press, 2017. She is the senior executive co-founding editor for The Windward Review, now in Volume 24.
January 2026 | nonfiction
If You Were There
If you were there, you surely would have noticed the scarlet slash cleaving the soft brown fuzz. Her roly-poly-curved shrunken shape. White sheets, once crisp, now softened by sweat. Darkened room illuminated regularly for blood draws, IV exchanges.
You would have heard her on the phone. Do you have avocados? Maybe bring one of those. And toast? Black beans too, those might work. Oh, a wheat tortilla and some grilled chicken. I can make a little taco. Maybe a bite of that will stay down. Ice cream, too, please, sometimes that’s okay. Something cold to drink – maybe Pepsi? No, Sprite.
Then, turning to me, “Can you believe it? My mom and sisters took my daughter. They were supposed to pick up pizza, bring it back here to eat with me. That would have been nice, right? They just texted that they are coming later, after they’ve finished eating. Why couldn’t they just eat here with me? Now I’m starving, and it may be too late to be able to hold anything down. That’s not nice of them, is it?”
You would have witnessed a woman arriving with a stack of cards. “You’ve got lots to do, Sis. I planned for all the birthdays, the graduations, even their weddings.” Maybe you would have recognized appropriation disguised as altruism.
You likely would have noted the numbers scattered throughout her questions. Will I be here 2 months from now? Can you believe the nurses have to wear gowns and gloves to hand me this 1 little pill? What should I tell my 3 children? Do you think they realize I may only have 14 days to live?
You never would have noticed:
A scar, mollified by years, a kind of cleavage under my blouse
Me alone in the bed, my family out for burgers
Suppressed shame that I was unable to write letters to my kids like the dying mom on Oprah
The newspaper clipping shared by a friend – a grief camp for kids with dead parents
My own numbers: 2 weeks to live; 12 previous cases, all diagnosed by autopsy; 3 major surgeries and dozens of procedures; 25 bonus years
An infant son learning to walk in my hospital room
His younger sister, not even arrived by that hospital room but present for all the following ones with the new scars and new guilt and new hope and new joy
You may have noticed me grab her hand, look into her eyes, whisper, “I’m here.”
Amy Agape
Amy Agape, PhD, provides spiritual companionship to hospitalized individuals and their families. This work, rooted in her own experience with a rare illness, invites her to listen deeply to others’ stories and explore the ways they interweave with her own. Amy dreams of a world where all people experience the profound blessing of being companioned with loving presence. She intends to spend the remainder of her days helping to create that world.
