Three Poems from wren james
grandma’s house folded palms dance on the hood of the car. drive up to the attic and pull out the sun, drag it out of the house hold it like a host. i give it to you to swallow. it’s fine when we’re together. it drips out your eyes. it sounds out your mouth, but […]
Fiction from Michael Garret Ashby II
Saving the Gladiator HE PULLED the trigger while he was sitting right next to me. When I first heard the shot I kept trying to tell myself it was just another clacking of the train on the rails, but trains don’t splatter blood over windows or dress shirts. I felt guilty in some respects. From […]
Nonfiction from Jennie Ziegler
The Telling RUBBER SNEAKER SOLES. Basement bars. Something out of Cheers. Glass bottles filled with amber, glinting dully against wood polished by arms, hands hammers on bartop. Billy Joel is crooning from a corner speaker, a low undertone. I sit under sticky tables, small hands swimming in wide stolen drums of bobbing maraschino cherries. A […]
Fiction from S.F. Wright
Strange Business I WAS TIRED of working as an adjunct and making no money, so I enrolled in a class to teach high school. I didn’t want to teach high school; I wanted to teach college. But after four years at my university and getting skipped over three times for full-time positions, I knew this […]
Fiction from Alice Whittenburg
A Reassuring Fiction 1. Early this morning, after he released more than one thousand documents concerning the black site in our region, Jihoon Kim went into hiding. Immediately there was a frenzy of media speculation about where he might be, but I knew that he hadn’t gone far. In fact he spent the day disguised […]
Nonfiction from C.C. Russell
DIA towards LGA, July 2003 THE WOMAN ACROSS from me speaks into her cell phone as if it were a walkie-talkie. She is telling the person on the other end that she had some trouble getting her boyfriend’s remains through security. She thinks that he would have probably found this whole incident funny and she […]
Fiction from Brennan Burnside
da Capo . /a I’VE HEARD KIDS in the school saying, “Watch out for the new kid.” Like it’s a Western. They’re parting seas of people to look for her. A celebrity with scant details to identify her. Rumor had it she had a brace—but that was over a year ago and it’s probably off by […]
Nonfiction from Toti O’Brien
The Night A CLEAR UNDERSTANDING of “syncopation” takes two cheap alarm clocks—those I get at the nearby dollar store. Two: one on my bed stand (I keep it close in spite of the noise, it soothes me), one in the adjacent living room. Doors wide open: the heat is unbearable otherwise. The house is quite […]
Poetry from Gabrielle Campagnano
Reporting The corpse was longer than the grand piano …………they found that same year …………………..while dredging for nothing they pulled up: ……………………………..rusting steel enforcement bars, rats still alive though punctured through the brain …………and flailing from a grab spoke, engine …………………..blocks. The skeleton of a giraffe. Being without a face, it was difficult …………to determine […]
Fiction from Lori Sambol Brody
The Girl Who Waits for the Superhero The girl who waits for the superhero stands on a rooftop above the City, high above streetlights and cold blue glows from windows. She’s vertiginous with power. She tells herself she’s waiting on that roof at midnight because the superhero is a source for her article on corruption—an investigation that will expose […]
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