In This Issue
The Twilight Zone
begins with dissonant strains of the national anthem, further distorted by the rink’s poor acoustics, accompanying the humming exit of the Zamboni machine. In the white glare of overhead lights, they signal it’s time to “get in the zone” for the free skate...
Moon Child
We drank Tang, just like the astronauts, but stopped short of breakfasting on freeze-dried eggs. Saturdays, Dad melted Crisco in the fryer, dropped little meteors of batter into the bubbles, served up fritters with real maple syrup. Sixties kids had it made in the...
Helen Geld
Helen Geld Helen Geld, a former graphic designer, now focuses on the creative process of photography and art. Her photographic work expresses the beauty and mystery of antique objects. Her work has appeared in such journals as Poppy Road Review, The Blue...
Mission Report: El Eclipse de la Grande
La Manzanilla, Jalisco, Mexico, Thursday, July 11, 1991 10:50 am I am writing in a thatched hut a half mile down the beach from the village. The surf crashes on the shore. Supplies 2 jugs agua pura 2 cameras Tortillas 1 can chicken meat which tastes like dog food 1...
The Goats
Even before the car turned into their driveway, Wilma and Edgar could see they had visitors. “Is that what I think it is?” Edgar said to his wife of forty years. “I believe so,” she answered. “Oh, well.” He peered out at two small...
A Romance to Night
In the crisp death of summer, a cat falls from a broken branch. The moon sings, amused by paw half-crushed under the stares of a passing car. Vacant children drive purposely through the blaze-maze of gilded cul-de-sacs scattered with condoms and crushed...
Stanley Horowitz
Stanley Horowitz Stanley Horowitz's work was exhibited in the 2008 Heckscher Museum Biennial show on Long Island. During the past two years, he was a featured photographer for The Wayfarer, and covers have been published for Rattle, Buddhist Poetry Review,...
Girl #4
Back there, someone crowned me. Yes, me! — Where do you think I got these carnations? I’d like to unclaim candidacy, but there’s already a Klimtish woman threading my hands with rings while someone calls for shin ribbons. A man cradling five pincushions coaxes...
Lila Byrne
Lila Byrne Lila Byrne’s passion for art began as early as she could hold a pencil. She has since taken many art classes, including programs at RISD, Pratt College, and Stamps at the University of Michigan. She has designed logos for various businesses in the...
Heat
I once was the hot new thing. You too? The new kid who stirred the id. I had some cheek; the classroom and rehearsal hall were my geek. If hot was or is your lot, some snot lives who wish you were not. They snide and snark, hide in the dark seeing if our bite is as...
Migration
he passed through brackish streets filled with disintegrated rubble and dilapidated homes unmoored from their footings strung together by sagging electrical lines extinguished of power and children’s playgrounds with rusted jungle gyms lonely and exsanguinated of...
Mark Anthony Burke
Learning to Dance Hooked on the two-four sorcery, bass and drum, dances at St. Jerome’s, I held up a wall for half an hour before I could ask the one whose eyes turned ice to water, spun home through the dark between the streetlamp pools of light. Lost in a trance for...
Leslie Brown
Leslie Brown Leslie Brown has an MFA in Creative Writing. Her digital work appeared on the cover of Zoetic Press, “NBR: World Tour,” and Variety Pact Art (Winter 2023/24). She was recently published this summer in Phoebe Literary Journal. For the past three years she...
When Haven’t I
The first human cremains I should have seen? What kind of question is that? I have an answer -- my mom’s. I did not see them because when they were done (is that the right way to put it?) I was living 300 miles away. I had them overnighted to her mother, 1,200 miles...
Dragonfly Puzzle Box
I. Honeyed mystery of mahogany, oak, walnut, teak, Fall’s tawny offerings sanded into curves, smooth invitation to touch, like the sun-warmed thigh & rising hip of that sunbaked young woman you once were, drowsing on a black sand beach in Santorini, water beading...
Stephen Curtis Wilson
Remembering Reid’s Photographs by Stephen Curtis Wilson In late 2020, Wilson was contacted by a family member of Reid Larson, owner of Reid’s Mobil Service Center in Edwards, IL. Reid would soon retire after over 50 years working with cars and trucks and 40...
Seo Jin Ahn
Seo Jin Ahn Seo Jin Ahn is a sophomore attending Chadwick International School in Songdo, Incheon, South Korea. His art practices are to create photo and video-based images. He developed and harnessed his skills in the forms of photography, cinematography, and the...
Featured Author, Michael Loyd Gray
Busted Flat in Baton Rouge I woke up to Janis Joplin’s whiskey raw voice on the radio. Shiner abruptly turned us south toward Baton Rouge, tapping his hands on the steering wheel. That’s all it took with Shiner, a whim, a change in the wind – song lyrics. We’d...
Goodnight Apostrophe
(*For the runaway bunnies morphing into boys) Good night you crooked little grapnel, hanging on to possession with the deference of a widow’s walk. Good night to all the graphemes — back slashes & sashaying greater thans buckling brackets upon ballroom blitzes....
The Nature and Psyche Project
The Nature and Psyche Project Emily Candler Davis' Opus, The Nature and Psyche Project, is a visual storytelling endeavor from Acadia National Park, a little heart-shaped island off of the coast of the United States. The images capture a human story or element...
Stephen Curtis Wilson
Stephen Curtis Wilson Wilson explores rural communities and urban neighborhoods searching for reminders of humanness, culture, and community. He was a medical and generalist photographer, writer, and communication specialist in the health care and library...
Scott Urquhart
Scott Urquhart Scott Urquhart is a volunteer on the frontlines of Russia's genocide against the Ukrainian people. He has been in this area of great contention since, working with schools and humanitarian aid across the country.
Lullaby to Bacteria
May you sleep in slushy apples, the acid mash of stomachs, seafloor chimneys smearing the deep with tartars of smoke. I coo to poisonous beans, noxious Botox twinkies, and hum at naughty bonbons of streptococci. Let your dreams carry hordes through...
Arrives Like the River
The scent of the river on his skin, late, hair and swimsuit wet from Barton Springs. Nine or ten at night, the candles dead. She’s fallen asleep or she’s pretending. It doesn't matter, she’s nothingness, blue tulle and white dreams. He sheds the trunks, gets in her...
Scales
Scaly edges pierce eggshell: my oval microcosm of speckled beige - limited, yet a thinly protective sphere. Siblings dispersed, hatching to dilating day-lit skies and mother’s sheltering feathers. Feather-winged, like her. Fitted into a puzzle. Her pieces. Not so,...
George L Stein
george l stein george l stein is a photographer living in northern new jersey and focused on art, street, decay, portraiture, and surreal genres. George has been published in a number of literary magazines such as the Toho Journal, Midwestern Gothic, After Hours,...
the all
& just like that aggrieved or not thrust flush against metal the all of abandoned farm machinery & all but barn of a house nettled/ in shambles of razor grass/ rooted/ my feet stumbling close enough to...
Contemporary Stuff
Reading poetry online takes me down the rabbit hole of the next poem and the next, and oh, I like this poet and how did they even come up with gold leaf or orange sweat. Outside, Spring is in the world. My husband’s down the hall drawing machinery on his...
No Anything
June-ish. We drove by William S. Burroughs’s house to see if we could feel his aura from the street. We were confused about why he lived in Kansas, of all places— because we’d only ever prayed to leave it. I was young and dumb and didn’t know half the story...
Someone Special
In the video, you’re riding a brown horse around a dusty cement arena somewhere in Mexico, the place you told me not to visit because you were enjoying your solitude, so I didn’t bother learning the city’s name. The horse trots and you bounce like a child on his...
The Romantics
‘Never apologise, never explain’: a mantra my mother shared with me frequently, and herself embraced as fiercely as any of her lovers whenever another of her liaisons came to light. Describing herself as ‘a strong woman’, she was, she said, unfettered by petty censure...
Half Empty
I expect the worst always even as a kid I expected birthday presents I didn’t want, like another loser Chutes and Ladders game I expected a D on my spelling test even though I was the best speller in the class and today for sure my car will need...
Another Chicken Dinner Fundraiser
We didn’t want to go to the homeless non-profit fundraiser, mostly because we were tired, because we already donated money and needed items, and had volunteered to work the shelter, but we were invited and had free tickets. It had been a while since we’d been out in...
Geon Park
Geon Park Geon Park is currently an 8th grader who is attending Saint Paul Preparatory School located in Seoul. He is extremely dedicated to sports, especially ice hockey. However, sports are not his only interest. Geon is also very interested in arts and...
Jane Hammons taught writing for three decades at UC Berkeley, where she received a Distinguished Teaching Award. Upon retirement, she moved to Austin, Texas, for five years before returning home to New Mexico. Her writing appears in numerous journals and anthologies: Alaska Quarterly Review, Southwestern American Literature, The Main Street Rag, Yellow Medicine Review, Hint Fiction, (Norton), The EastOver Anthology of Rural Writers of Color, 2023 and 2024, The Maternal is Political (Seal Press), and Selected Memories, (Hippocampus Books). She enjoys photography as part of her writing practice, and three of her photographs are included in Taking It To the Streets: A Visual History of Protest and Demonstration, an exhibition of the Austin History Center. She is an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation.
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Michael C. Roberts is a retired pediatric psychologist and professor. He has digital and film photographs in Burningword, The Canary, The Storms, FERAL, Cholla Needles, Cantos, The Healing Muse, Cold Moon, Right Hand Pointing, Door is a Jar, Camas, Hindsight, Straylight, Thimble, Ponder, Closed Eye Open, Alchemy Spoon, 3rd Wednesday, The Right Words, Cardinal Sins, Human Obscura, Blue Mesa Review, The Word’s Faire, and elsewhere. In his recent photography, he has been exploring minimalism as projection and abstraction. The simplicity of minimalism reduces both nature and the human-made to their basics, revealing the essential beauty in structure and form. Although austere, these silhouetted images of nature allow the viewer to appreciate the world’s simple complexity and basic beauty.
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