In This Issue
Marina
It is a ritual to bathe the daughter. Baptized, she purifies dirty water, rinsed over long hair that falls out between fingers. Years ago, we handed her to a man over a vat and believed him when he said she would not drown. Face down, screams dull; Reverberated...
Carrion
The boy loves lying in this open field, blinking at the bowl of summer sky. Heedless of wiregrass itching his neck, of ants sizing up his ears, he tracks the somber wings that float and swoop in primordial arcs as though suspended from puppeteer’s strings. Still as a...
What You Didn’t See Coming
The first time you get the wind knocked out of you, you will be astonished by what seems a fatal wallop— one moment running, the next, bulge-eyed and gaping like a carp tossed in a rowboat. No one prepares us. We face this first shock as innocents, unwarned of the...
“Not everything’s a poem”
When she said that, I think she has never tasted how a good Irish whiskey echoes in your mouth after you swallow its heat. Or understood the way lint can reveal the archeology of your life. Her comment tells me she has never watched a vivid crimson cardinal alight on...
A New Term for It
Indoctrinating myself I shuffle towards the polls And pull the lever Expecting a trapdoor to open up And plunge me into the awaiting waters below The Styx or just a secret underground channel Leading perhaps to the East River They’re both abysmal passages Whichever...
Taco Tuesday
Lisa sends me this long text grumbling about her husband and how he’s informed her he can’t handle Taco Tuesdays anymore and now she must redo her ENTIRE menu for January because the selfish bastard can’t deal with spicy food, and I’m thinking, damn. You’re lying in...
V Club
Remember Twiggy, her skeletal body was all the rave. That led us to Form the V Club. Teachers thought we meant Glee club. (Not V for Vomit) It wasn’t until three 8th grade girls were taken away in an ambulance that the school got wise. I was called the Ring Leader...
Everywhere All the Time (with a Line from Ashley Capps)
I hear a shotgun crack and find mother at the woodpile—she’s shot another rat snake. “But,” I say, “they keep the rabbit population down?” “I like rabbits,” is her reply. “But your garden,” I say. “Nothing anyone can do about that,” she sighs. Here, it’s...
An entry journal
Feb or March 17, 1995 As my suitcase orbits away from me, I surprise myself by shouting “our bag.” Unbeknownst to me I have begun talking in plural. As we drive toward our home, I am puzzled by the empty sidewalks. The man who’s both from here and there assures me...
The Museum of Future Affairs
To go back is as hard almost as forward. We all got a little silence lodged in our molars some time in middle school, mostly. Field trips to the museum of future affairs, long bus rides, behind the glass our taxidermied bodies in frozen...
From across the Tracks
Up county, here in Mount Kisco, the men from across the tracks wait patiently at the station every weekday morning, not for a train, but a day job, seated on the edge of the sidewalk or against the fence, near where cars enter to drop off or pick up, all expectantly...
A grasshopper in tall grass
I. The Buddhas tell us not to think of a heaven, of a hell… This breath comes. That breath goes. Then nothing. II. Klara Dan von Neumann, drove from home to the beach— walked into the surf and III. Woolf wrote: ...
On Reading Auden to the Ghost of a Lost Limerence
In the Peabody Library reading room, a ramshackle longing has liberty to roam, While the rhetoric of busybodied reality bustles without and within The center of self-knowing. Beneath the architraves scrolled with Grecian ghosts, And over the bookcases crimped dense...
Featured Author, Mark Crimmins
WORKEROLICK There’s a run on peaches. Soon the shelves in Produce are empty. I go down to the basement to get more. When I step out of the lift into the warehouse, I see my boss. Disco Dez. There he is in his bellbottoms, bouncing what looks like a tennis ball on the...
Fertility
It was spring, no I mean dusk, and the killdeer began stepping up out of intricate doors in the field. They sported unseen fires beneath their downy vests. Their presence had been warming the soil before the corn crop, except for their dead sisters,...
What to Wear When Having a Drink with Your Ex
It has been forty years. he in New York me in San Francisco. erasing him with ease for forty years. yet he is coming and wants to meet for a drink. really? does he regret the divorce and realize he fucked up by sleeping with Sally and Sara and Sue? spending weekends...
Aidan J Hong
Aidan J Hong is a sophomore at Seoul International School in Seongnam, Korea. His passion for arts is geared towards architecture and art history. He also develops ideation on journalism, environmental concerns, archeology, and more. Aidan plans to continue...
Jihu Kim
Jihu Kim is a junior at Yongsan International School of Seoul, South Korea. Her art practice began with an interest in art history. She is the founder of her school’s Art of Korea club and studies art conservation. Skilled in traditional art forms, she applies...
Jian Kim
Jian Kim is an 11th grader student attending St. Johnsbury Academy Jeju in South Korea. She is interested in many fields, wanting to explore and inquire deeply about them and express them artistically. Also, She always tries to convey a particular message to...
Edie Noesser
Edie Noesser is an artist based in Orange County, California working in the medium of photography. Her work explores themes of nature, urban scenes and contemporary culture. This series of photos was taken in Downtown, Santa Ana, California where Edie was...
Yeobin Park
Yeobin Park, a BC Collegiate sophomore and Vice-President of BCC Point of View, debuted her film "Unfinished Dream," showcasing her skills in directing, filming, and editing with Adobe Premiere Pro and Davinci Resolve. She aims to create films with bold...
Nicholas Mayo
Nicholas B. Mayo (he/him) is a poet and artist based in Philadelphia, PA. His poetry has been published by Down in the Dirt Magazine and is forthcoming from Abstract: Contemporary Expressions. His paintings have been exhibited at Swarthmore College and Texas...
Ian Wells
Ian Wells is a graduate researcher at the Washington State University HYPER Lab studying Mechanical Engineering. He focuses on optical and EM systems with experience in aerospace, thermal, and nuclear analysis. He hopes to continue contributing to aerospace...
Martha Nance
Martha Nance is a physician in Minnesota whose cellphone has a wandering eye, which gets rewarded mostly when she is not in Minnesota.
Kathryn Jordan
Kathryn holds an English M.A. from UC Berkeley. Her poems have twice won Honorable Mention in the Steve Kowit Poetry Prize and the Patricia Dobler Poetry Award, and have twice garnered Special Merit for the Muriel Craft Bailey Poetry Prize. Her work appears in...
John M. Blodgett
John M. Blodgett is an editor, reporter, and photojournalist based in Southern Maine. He most recently was an editor at The Boulder Monitor in Boulder, Montana, and has staffed on or contributed to publications that include The Western News, The Press-Enterprise, The...
Larena Nellies-Ortiz
Larena Nellies-Ortiz is a freelance photographer from Oakland, California. Her photos have been featured in Sun Magazine, Barren Magazine, Indianapolis Review, Burningword Literary Journal, Local Wolves Magazine, Stonecoast Review, and 3Elements Review. She...
Teresa Hyoju Chang
Teresa Hyoju Chang is a South Korean artist who was born with a love for art, reading, and writing from an early age. Currently a student at Seoul International School, she takes a particular interest in the subjects of history and Spanish, and also...
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 New York...
Seo Jin Ahn
Seojin Ahn Is a Junior attending Chadwick International School in Songdo, Incheon, South Korea. His art practice is to create photo-based images. He developed and harnessed his skills in photography and the utilization of tools such as Illustrator and...
Stephen Curtis Wilson
Wilson was a medical-surgical, and generalist photographer, writer, and communication specialist in the health care and library science fields for 36 years - cut steel in a foundry and drove a truck for a time. He is a graduate of the University of Illinois, a...
Steve Zimmerman
Steve Zimmerman Steve Zimmerman is a writer and photographer based in the Pacific Northwest. His work has appeared in the Evansville Review, Target Gallery, the Tacoma Art Museum, as well as many online publications. More of his images can be found at...
Somewhere in the Midst of Me, a Twig Snapped
I am okay with being monstrous, I know how you view me when I step out with three heads, I know the many ways you think of me. The day folds up into a tiny square which I put into my middle mouth, underneath its tongue. Watch the neck twitch. I am many things but easy...
The Albatross of Liquid Despair
hovers over your coiffed head, cawing in protest at the abominable stench rising, tears in its eyes, close to regurgitating its hard-sought lunch. Coleridge. Coleridge. Coleridge, you dotard. Have you no pity? No mercy? Must you pollute the earth’s air with poetry,...
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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