In This Issue
Michael Horton
Ping Pong The house was a gift—picture perfect weekend luxury on the lake. From their three daughters. They were all doing well, money wasn’t a hurdle, and they wanted to show their parents a good time. Just relax. Sit on the dock. Hold hands, the oldest adds. They’d...
Amy Agape
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....
Jamey Hecht
Perv Circus The annual Perv Circus celebrated its first decade with a huge bash at the Grand Palace Hotel. Nobody could have brought it off with more panache or bigger profits than Charlie Pinkhaus, known to his entourage as “The Founder.” Charlie knew hundreds of the...
Steve Deutsch
After, we took the long way home. As if such a simple act might flummox fate. We are a good people. We bury our dead and help the maimed to cross the road. Yet the image persists. One careless step along the poorly cobbled...
Kyle Selley
Kyle Selley Kyle Selley draws with explosive residue. Explosions and their indexical marks are naturally celestial, producing tactile residue that echoes stellar formations. Across scales, he's found patterns of residual dust, energy radiating outward, order surfacing...
Kimm Brockett Stammen
Waves The ship wasn't rocking, still there was a sensation of lilting movement, of repeated unbalancing and rebalancing, as she leaned over the railing and reached out to the waves far below. The instant before he approached, she felt that someone would...
Emma Sywyj
Emma Sywyj Emma Sywyj is an award-winning artist and photographer who has been creating art for twenty years. For five of those years, she was based in London, studying photography at Camberwell College of Arts, UAL. From there, she received a BA in Photography and a...
Robert Miner
The general’s family selects an earth spirit for his mausoleum Tang Dynasty, China May I say you bring great honor to the artisans of our studio by seeking our earth spirits for the general’s tomb? The widow, sitting on a stone bench with her two sons, nodded...
Fabio Sassi
Fabio Sassi Fabio Sassi creates photographs and acrylics using materials considered worthless by the mainstream. He often puts a quirky twist on his subjects or employs an unusual perspective that offers a fresh angle. Fabio lives in Bologna, Italy, and his work can...
Grace Lynn
My Muse is Growing Up My muse wears prescription glasses, so she’ll never see beyond the village with its walled-in acres of poolside loungers. Plus, she quit her diet, so her diaphragm gags her esophagus and larynx. I’ll find another voice...
Richard Holinger
Diapers In rural northern Illinois northwest of Chicago, a raised, pressed, gray gravel path, long ago a railroad track, runs straight for miles, bordered by trees. On one side, farmers harvest their cornfields, green John Deere combines and tractors stirring up more...
John Dorroh
My Daddy Was an Omnivore He drank coffee in the wee hours long before the sun oozed its way up over the hardwoods at the end of the property. He played Solitaire and smoked Camels before he woke all of us up to begin our day. My mother had to be at work by 7. Daddy...
Priscilla Long
One Day in the Life of Donna DeSimone Donna, you will never become less deaf, her audiologist informs. Keep learning, she encourages herself. In ASL she has reached the letter L. Keep living. She buses down to Pike Place Market to purchase potatoes and greens, maybe...
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, he has, in ten years, published nonfiction, fiction, poetry, photography, hybrid works, interviews, and plays in...
Carlos Cunha
Monochrome Lane The strip mall may well be on its last legs, but it still litters the landscape of many American towns and suburbs, especially here in Florida – an aggressively charmless, deservedly unloved suburban phenomenon that usually consists of nothing more...
Dotty LeMieux
When the Neighbors Sell their Knock-Down in Just Four Years for Twice What They Paid for it They spiff it up, repair old siding, cut into the crumbling hillside to squeeze in a bonus room. Throw on a coat of paint, shiny like a chrome-plated lie. Bucolic gem...
Avital Gad-Cykman
Clockwise Quite late into my pregnancy, the day I eventually did pregnancy tests and all three came out positive (Surprise! I’m here!), my husband said he’d always yearned to be a father, (Have I developed something new? These are voices outside!), a statement of...
Francine Witte
Test This is a test. A heartbeat test. A bloodbeat test. My doctor tells me I'm going to die. This is certain. I want to tell the doctor it's OK My doctor is a quack. Quick homemade remedies -- everything to cure halitosis and eczema. You can't leave his office...
Lizbeth Bárcena
Arid Land Thermophilia love for the desert heat / a cautionary affair I don’t feel overjoyed or conceited to hear people bitch about heat in a hot place, in late May, amid what’s befalling the Earth– It’s two degrees more– think less clothing, more...
Tetman Callis
Tetman Callis Tetman Callis is a writer and artist who lives in Chicago. His stories have been published in a variety of literary venues, most recently including BULL, Tahoma Literary Review, Elm Leaves Journal, Anti-Heroin Chic, Running Wild Press: Short Story...
June Chua
Fever Dream You are about 7, skinny, sheathed in a flaxen knit dress. Margarine yellow. You are persuaded by the son of your godmother, your namesake, to climb through a large, wooden fence into a meadow. It’s late June, your month. You have only been on this new...
Joan E. Bauer
A Kat, a Mouse, a Brick Be not harsh with ‘Krazy.’ He is but a shadow of himself caught in the web of this mortal skein. —George Herriman (1880-1944) Charlie Chaplin, Jack Kerouac, R. Crumb, Quentin Tarantino. Krazy Kat has some loyal fans. Cartoonist...
Sarah Sorensen
So You’ve Decided to Convert Your Middle-Aged Bedroom into a Magical Forest But All You Have is Amazon and Weed Take the edible and ask yourself which discount rug seems most like grass. Whisper the now popular refrain “touch grass.” Then make sure that it...
Billie Jean Stratton
Objects From The Pyramid Collection: A Catalog of Personal Growth And Exploration Mystic body dust things that come to us Oils of ecstasy fuel for allergies Karma Sutra candles life that's hard to handle Pleasure enhancers nude dancers...
Alina Zollfrank
Identity You have a love-hate relationship with eagles. It’s the national animal for your home nest, also the national emblem for your chosen nest. In the end, it’s all just a bunch of letters and feathers. If you’re lucky, some numbers, too, but let’s be honest, your...
Michelle Strausbaugh
Not Another Tragic Fattie Your new sixth-grade class already had its own rhythms, inside jokes, and hierarchy. Like, it was already over halfway through the school year. And there was this fat girl—like really fat. Like, nearly 200lbs-fat. She was such a nerd. Like,...
DM Frech, Featured Artist
DM Frech DM Frech has a BFA and an MFA in dance from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and is a member of The Muse, Poetry Society of VA, The Writers Guild of Virginia, James River Writers, KPC Writers, Virginia Writers, and so on. She writes poetry,...
Cindy Wheeler, Featured Author
The Desire to Sink It was, for the first twenty-four an anvil. No, a dozen anvils pressing me into the hotel bed. I was glad for them, hoping they might press me into nothingness, where I thought you might be. In my dream I decorated them with flowers and snot. When I...
Holly Redell Witte
Phoebe Sneezed and Smelled Bacon Phoebe sneezed and smelled bacon. “What is this?” Nobody else was home and hadn’t been for four days so it couldn’t be a lingering smell. It was distinct. Bacon. “I’m gonna look this up,” she said aloud to herself. It should be...
Holly Willis
Holly Willis Holly Willis is a writer and photographer who moves between Maine and California, exploring landscape, color, movement, and material, using both old, analog technologies as well as new digital tools. Her writing includes poetry and lyric essays, and her...
Myfanwy Williams
The Women Who Carry I. A woman carries her uterus in a plastic grocery bag floating in formaldehyde, stoppered in a bell jar: inside her, the void sewn tight to stop her organs from migrating, where the blue whales churning in that black hole of hunger have...
VA Wiswell
VA Wiswell VA lives outside Seattle, WA, with her human and animal family. When not writing, she enjoys ice skating, reading, and working on her photography and her art projects. Her work has appeared in Literary Heist, Ignatian Literary Magazine, Five on the...
Frederick Wilbur
Aubade for Aurora Before that late hour of blue cheese and ruddy-skinned pears, white wine, she asks me questions I cannot answer simply: forget night’s history, the weight of excuse? I cannot ignore her briberies of pink and gold. Will...
Stephen Curtis Wilson
Stephen Curtis Wilson Wilson is a designer and photographer. His deeply personal view of this quintessentially Midwestern region, central Illinois, highlights and celebrates its visual textures and curiosities. He was a medical and generalist photographer 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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