Category: VOLUME I

Fish Hanging, Tess Brown-Lavoie [Trigger Warning: Death Mention] When she was told that Charlie was dead, my mother fell limp and gasping to the earth. My father—who had answered the phone—was startled by her collapse. He somehow had not anticipated the force of his blunt report (“Charlie is dead”) which of course wrecking-balled her, a demolition…

Untitled, Adam Chambers     Escaping the humidity at last, I collapse on the sofa, dead weight melting into the cool white leather. She brings me water and sits on the stone ledge of the fireplace, lighting a blue American Spirit, handing it to me, and lighting another. She waits for words. I tell her I…

Untitled, Benjamin Etten   In a famous episode of the television show, The Twilight Zone, Henry Bemis, “a bookish little man whose passion is the printed page but who is conspired against by…a world full of tongue-cluckers and the unrelenting hands of the clock,” miraculously survives a nuclear blast. The lone survivor, he despairs until he discovers…

Blue Line, Emily Gray Tareila     Ever since we marched with tube socks and Trapper Keepers into kindergarten, we have been urged to be who we want to be, to invent, to impress, to remember that the sky is the limit (for even if we miss the moon, we’ll land among the stars—or something like…

Through the Stones, Ian Dolton-Thornton   The office space is cheap because it is the hallway between the kitchen and the bathroom at the San Francisco Tenant’s Union. I suspect that we are still being ripped off, but not so much as we might be by others elsewhere. There are advantages, disadvantages, and simple facts of…

Rocks, Sara Sisun   I’ve done enough packing to know that some things are easier to pack than others. Like books. I always pack my entire bookshelf in watery-brown, foursquare boxes, the kind you seal by bending an edge beneath another, almost ripping it in the process. They’re tricky, those boxes. Bathroom toiletries fit perfectly inside…

Kangding Cigarette Man, Jeremy Nelson   New Orleans: blues crackin’, hip swinging, finger-sucking, muckraking, turn the body into a song hot sweaty push you up against a wall humidity breathing onto you like a hot panting beast that can only be tamed by po’ boys and ice-cold daiquiris and crawdad crawfish sold by the pound get…

Plaid Sweater (1931) and Cape Coat (1982) by Grant Wood and Andrew Wyeth   In Andrew Wyeth’s winter landscapes, Pennsylvania seems to groom itself with a cold gray tongue. Down it sweeps, over wide brown plains and farms, over towns and small cities. It gentles the cows that graze fenced-in fields, the light-eyed farmers who bring them out to…

Couch, Mirra Schwartz   Stay up until five in the morning, having your heart broken from nine time zones away. Discover new and exciting forms of pain. Feel like you’ve had the skin peeled off your body and your insides scraped empty. Be twenty. Feel twelve. Understand love songs for the first time. Make it through…

The Labyrinth, Beth Carolyn Callaway [Trigger Warning: Death Mention; Depictions of Animal Death] Arcadia An orange glow around a corner—sometimes a Christmas tree in a darkened room by a bookcase and a sofa, sometimes the stained-glass lamp that Jessica left along with the stolen Nativity Christ and a microwave. My eyes are smarting. The Catastrophe I…

Xinnian Kuaile, Patrick Depuydt [Trigger Warning: Depictions Of Mild Gore] Don’t ask me nothing about nothing, I might just tell you the truth.Remember how they took her bloody clothes out of the car, ripped locks of hair: outlaw souvenirs to sit on the pantry shelves. Well it’s like this, you and me—we could cut a path…

Chapel in Winter, Jenny Brum     In maps, I look for you, In myth, in frames, but mirrors— I can watch you quietly, a subtle glance, then wayward fall against The gravity of spine, the trail of bones that builds your back That twist and pull, the tides of water rolling endless under bridges— The…

Untitled, Liz Melsheimer     Sometimes in the evening when he walked along the beach he would fill his bucket with shells and break them into pieces with his feet, thinking he could hear the turn of a water wheel or the glass vowels and jagged consonants of Greek. Hermes found him prostrate on the desert…

Bridge, Cory Gans     Some years past, her hair, cold like ice, soft like feathers, brushed past my poor hand.       About the Author Daniel Chevalier, California State University Daniel Chevalier has recently been accepted to the nonfiction writing program at the University of Iowa. His work has appeared in Statement and in Work Literary Magazine.…

Untitled, Mae Ryan     He talks of Relativity but half of Freundlich’s team is taken prisoner. The rest of us are left to gaze at the gray, condensing lid descending; those clouds overhead remind me of a time in Berlin. A naked girl stood in the window; she saw me look and pulled the shade…

It’s The Simple Things, Allison McKenzie     Again the squid that swallows light has no shadow. It flickers in and out of sight in the inexorably slow click of a zoetrope spinning itself out in pictures. A full day and night before the squid blinks with bioluminescence again, counterilluminates light above with light below until…

From a Lighthouse, Zach Russo [Trigger Warning: Child Death Mention/Death Mention] Her little house smells like sulfur. Inside, it glows yellow, a combination of southern sun and outdated light fixtures. Her tap water tastes salty. My great-grandmother hates antiques. She is ninety-five years old today. “Why you wanna buy something old, baby?” She stands with one…

Drum Heads, Kalen Keir     When you buried me in the sand, I lost my legs beneath the earth; forgot my limbs. You stooped to my ear, said You’re done: and I remembered my hands, the sharpness of my elbows. I cracked the palm-smoothed surface of the beach, broke your fingerprints and emerged like Athena from…

Untitled, Lauren Harris   I First, Stalin burned the forests. Next, planted hemlocks in mathematical rows so no one could hide in the woods, sap running down the legs of the evergreens. II I melt gooseberries into jam, mosquitoes swarming at my eyes. The pond is lukewarm, pollen-coated. A rain of insects and woodsmoke buries us…

Maroc, Asia Suler     See          something nameless                 comes riding                 down the limestone                 scarp and counterscarp                 orange bougainvillea              …

Trail of Shoes, Tina Horton     The rehearsal dinner is at the Red Top Restaurant. We sit at three tables they had pushed together. Each place already has an ice water and the waitresses wait at either end with their hands in their aprons while their nametags droop from their faded red shirts engraved with…

America At War, Coloring Book, 1943, Broc Blegen       I‘ve been to the moon, and now they want to take away my office. “I need it,” I say. “Be honest, Dick,” says Leroy. “When was the last time you needed it?” It’s his job to manage the office space, and sometimes he gets kind…