Poetry from Emma Bolden
Photo: Clay LeConey Joy Honestly it’s awful. How it haloes every tiny terrible thing with promise, even the forsythia, dying, already dead, melting to scum green, a sick yellow over the vase. Gray would be better, a more accurate approximation of the way joy balloons up the sky: it isn’t the Mylar sack, bright as […]
Poetry from Amy DeBellis
Photo: Alexander Gray Lazarus When you come back, I’ll be ready. No more murky mornings; no more cindery coffee, sinking half-lucid into the dreaming day. I’ll sculpt my bed into a morgue, a monastery. No sheets, no softness, just cold metal that stings like the cry of a bird: the only way to unravel my […]
Fiction from Claudia Monpere
Photo: Rob Humphrey How to Be Purple First there is no first. Purple has no sequence. lilac…..mauve…..heliotrope Purple swirls in rain puddles. Wisteria twining with crystal. Indigo nebula birthed from rippling walls. A trellis humming with grapes. Learn this language: bluebell grapes autumn royal moondrop kyoho sultana crimson seedless. Be a violet backed starling. These […]
Fiction from Madeline Graham
Photo: Jr Korpa The Better to Eat You With She worries meat from the lupine skull with a long and pointed knife. Her red cloak slung over the back of her chair. Blond braids caked in blood. Daisy bouquet upended on the floor. She tongues bristly fur, grinding gristle between her molars, tendons snap between […]
Poetry from Courtney Melvin
Photo: Dave Michuda Stir Every morning you ask Do you still love me? as if the night erased us. I say of course. I say you’re the father of my children. I say stop being silly. To admit that I’d stir your ashes into my coffee, drink you every day until your skin was my […]
Fiction from David Yourdon
Photo: Nikita Tikhomirov Cliché And then he died. The day before, he had felt well, calm. Not an end-of-life, transcendent calm. We didn’t believe in that. But the pain had abated. A month before, the pain had been worse. By then, we had set up camp in the hospital. It was clear that we were […]
Poetry from Ace Boggess
Photo: Shayna “Bepple” Take Her Father Refuses Medical Treatment Though he’s gone from working hard outside each day to gingerly walking through the house, stumbling, toppling—a clown act, were he acting. I tell her to call an ambulance, talk sense into him, keep him alive as if he hasn’t given up. Suddenness is the heart […]
Fiction from Melissa Ostrom
Photo: Matt Artz She’ll Deal Quickly One, from their first week, the red shirt drawn from his shoulders, worn home a next-morning to rub and breathe. She plans to keep it. Two, the key to the side door. Hers. Three, wind. It scrapes leaves off the grass, flings them at the window, as if to […]
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