Nonfiction from Rachel Laverdiere
Photo: George Pagan III For the Love of (Dis)Order “We adore chaos because we love to produce order.” – M.C. Escher I sandwich the pillows that were yours between the bed and the wall, inhale the scent of freshly laundered sheets and wait for sleep to descend. Eventually, I stare out the window. Attempt to […]
Fiction from Marvin Shackelford
Photo: Michael Dziedzic A Tragic Misstep in Evolution One day they’ll dig me from the limestone and ash so long settled around my frame and wonder what to do with me. The scene should be instructive: primitive homo-whatever we’re called by then, -sapient long since come and gone and forgotten, simply laid down and died […]
Nonfiction from Lori Brack
Photo: Adam Littman Davis The Ground, Remembering Between birth and the Siamese kitten I begged for when I was five, there were ants: an unending caravan of them plying the beveled crack in the concrete patio where I knelt, sun baking my dark hair soft. At intervals, an ant would cling to the bevel, hang […]
Poetry from Carl Boon
Photo: REVOLT The Other America When I was tender in the breasts and still fourteen, I started sticking pins in the numb flesh of my elbows. And because it didn’t hurt the way I needed, I set fires in my bedroom, small ones at first, hymn book pages, Barbie hair, Popsicle sticks. I didn’t want […]
Poetry from Karly Jacklin
Photo: Lena White IN WHICH WE DON’T HUNT DOVES BUT INSTEAD AIM OUR SHOTGUNS AT THE SKY I wake up alone in it: It, the heirloom gleam of misery. Inherited, like this feeling was somethinglocked in my grandmother’s chest until January.Until “mother meet ground.” Mother me, ground. And I don’t ask for this sequence—nobody ever […]
Poetry from Babo Kamel
Photo: Curious About All The Message on the Tissue Today I answered the oven, but no one was there. It could have been a crank call. I told it to hang on. I couldn’t remember what name I was using. Someone keeps asking if I know who the president is. I tell them that I […]
Poetry from Darren Higgins
Photo: Amin Hasani Eating Songbirds Smoke nests in the fire pit The stones hiss Oil-swabbed bodies butter browned on spits Thyme, pith sharp hollow bones— Cut off the beak . . Darren Higgins is a writer and artist living in Waterbury Center, Vermont. His poems and stories have appeared in The Iowa Review, Quick Fiction, […]
Fiction from Derek Fisher
Photo: Adrian N. Rash Purple sky in morning. Endless promise of warming. Purple sky at night. We all turn out the light. I decided to do a thing. Every hour on the hour I’d tell a stranger they’re beautiful. The decision came to me while writing poems in the Greenhouse Cafe. It hasn’t gone well […]
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