Fiction from Kara Oakleaf
Photo: Dustin Tramel The Shadow Boyfriends Vanessa is the first of the mothers to bring up her shadow boyfriend. You all watch the children from the park benches, eyes behind sunglasses and iced coffees in your hands, and she tells all of you how she still thinks of an ex, all these years later, how […]
Fiction from Bronwen Griffiths
Photo: Collin Williams Cadair Werdd (The Green Chair) Our father sat in the green chair for over a decade—its arms slowly turning black and frayed, the seat sinking under his weight. He weighed his words and spoke only when necessary and he used Welsh, his mother-tongue. All traces of English seemed to have vanished from […]
Poetry from Jill Michelle
Photo: Milad Fakurian Underwater She hides outside this white-walled room the never-painted nursery grief pulling at her hems like a toddler. She sits, swaddles it long enough for her funeral blacks to ivy over. Unfinished flowers fall from her skirts. Red petals. Motherhood, the bright bulb her moth-heart circles though she knows it might kill […]
Fiction from Melissa Benton Barker
Photo: Jens Lelie Mother and Son The Girl on the Bus The bus winds round and round the mountain, up the mountain, down the mountain, the girl curled, asleep in the last seat, she missed her stop, she’s been forgotten. The bus goes all the way up to the top of the mountain, place of […]
Poetry from Megan Lynn Wilkinson
Photo: Igor Shalyminov I Thee Wed give me your name all the way to Nova Scotia sell me blue bead lilies populate the sacked city of my mind with swift wit and Chadron tilt your head show me bantering arousal pull and roll time like saltwater taffy repeating your granddad’s risk and romance packed and […]
Fiction from A.C. Koch
Photo: Jakub Dziubak My Fire Still Burns Until she found the right word, she couldn’t tell the story. Without exactly the right word, it would sound crass, or pathetic—the daydream of a delusional person. And although she could nearly taste the word, it wouldn’t come. Min-ji sipped her pineapple juice through a straw and pressed […]
Poetry from Cloe Watson
Photo: Andreas Almstedt Alone I remember the Velveteen Rabbit and his sick boy because I’m a sick girl, and I just saw a black sky, bold in its purple shadow. But velvet can be any color, and I’m a woman, was a woman when I crawled to the bathtub, stopping just short to pass out […]
Fiction from Chris Haven
Photo: Avess Chicken Little, the Later Years So Chicken Little is sitting around, and that good for nothing Turkey Lurkey comes by and says hey, the sky is falling. Chicken Little says to Turkey Lurkey you’re full of crap. And then Henny Penny and Lucy Goosey and all the other birdbrains come by and say […]
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