Poetry from Douglas Cole
Photo: Anandu Vinod Re-entry An absurd storm, everything coming down, rooftop littered with cedar limbs. I dream a road and road appears. The country store with pelts and shotguns, camping supplies, rattlesnake floating in a jar, door slamming at my back as I slip away, emerge on your porch as you say, there you are. […]
Nonfiction from Bassam Sidiki
Photo: Danielle MacInnes Uninvited Guests Author’s note: The following personal essay is an example of the Indo-Persian mode of oral storytelling called dāstān or qiṣṣah. The essay adopts a very specific subgenre of this mode, the t̤irāz. According to Urdu scholar Pasha M. Khan, the t̤irāz was grouped into four chapters called “ḳhabars,” plus a conclusion […]
Nonfiction from Preeth Ganapathy
Photo: Jane Kim Mornings Silence is a thick blanket over the morning air. The damp mud shoots wisps of warmth up into the sky, its strength not enough to achieve the purpose of its intention. Grey works its way into the minutes, into the words and into sleep. Rain whispers in drops, to the concrete […]
Poetry from Amanda Dettmann
Photo: Robert Katzki Self-Love in the Afterlife “Hour of the rooster, what belongs there. Hour of the rooster, what belongs there” ~JinJin Xu If your face is my face, press your forehead to my forehead. You are the baptism to my gasping bathtub. Shower me like a sunburned synecdoche. If in the afterlife I don’t […]
Poetry from Michelle Brooks
Photo: Pranay Pareek The Better Part of Yesterday My heart is a deserted street in the middle of winter, dead leaves skittering in the dying afternoon light. I am a stop sign riddled with bullet holes, pinpricks of sunlight streaming through me. And you? You are everything – the light and shadow, the broken glass […]
Fiction from Abbie Barker
Photo: Jack Hodges Alice, Some of the Time Sometimes Alice waits at the end of her driveway for the bus. Sometimes she stomps in the slush, water seeping through the cracks of her boots, and she spends the day in damp socks. Sometimes Alice takes too long picking through her hamper for something clean, or […]
Poetry from Laura Miller
Photo: Colin Maynard Sonnet for the sleeping (utilitarian poem) The same about a three-armed bench is true for a supermarket; true for little concrete pyramids beneath an overpass; cornfields that bear no crops, but highschoolers, dressed for Halloween, painted by smoke and incense, begging you through damp hay and plywood to call them for liars. […]
Poetry from Colette Cosner
Photo: Claudio Schwarz Jesus Year When you’re eight and your mother’s boyfriend buys you a calendar that’s just past and you don’t stop crying in the stationary aisle of Barnes & Noble until you have a daughter of your own. Time just one of those things we say. Like that letter I wrote you, bottled […]
Poetry from Mara Lee Grayson
Photo: Rob Laughter The Veteran I Met in Reparatory He was handsome for an older man with scars. Rumors hopped from mouth to mouth backstage. We were always trying on the truth, never fully comfortable without a costume. Rumors hopped from mouth to mouth backstage. I knew what it was like to be an actor, […]
atlasandalice.com 