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 […]
Fiction from Denise Tolan
Photo: Aleks Dorohovich Sell You, Sell Me The Commercial: The commercial ran in the early eighties, in the evenings when sitcoms came on. So many sitcoms came on. The shot began with a black screen, then quickly opened to a wide shot of fireworks over a lake; the concept seemingly a meta-firework itself. As if […]
Fiction from Jane Snyder
Photo: Adam Chang Little Red Schoolhouse My mother and father were in a good mood the day they put us on the train, full of fun. It was Saturday and they stayed upstairs for a long time. When they came down they sat on the couch with us, watching Underdog, said nothing about it being […]
Fiction from Dennis Barone
Photo: Immo Wegmann Quartet Gianni walked down the street to see if his car had been sold. To his chagrin, there it sat, apparently unmoved as well as unsold, the large banner price still affixed to the front windshield. He had tried to convince the owner of the lot to affix not a price but […]
Poetry from Carol Stewart
Photo: Hello I’m Nik The World Is Full of Those Who Bear Its Weight Now and then, I tell him my dreams like when he turned into a giant Lego brick, playing catch me if you can up and down the stairs or when he unleashed an antlered pig into the guest room; how could […]
Poetry from Tom England
Photo: Devi Puspita Amartha Yahya Aqua Dulce These sad thoughts that follow you round like Leaves. Once, once only, you see your son In the garden, at the glass house, pressing seeds Into cold dark soil. A radio buzzes somewhere. It is stranger than a dream. You try and throw it off Like old shoes, […]
Poetry from Pat Daneman
Photo: Rene Bohmer The Garden She is made out of rain now. We can put our hands right through her. She is wailing and sleeplessness and unwashed hair. Some days she rises to take an orange from the table, and we hope she will let us lead her into air, return her a limb at a […]
Poetry from Katherine Anderson Howell
Photo: Benjamin Lehman The Millionaire of American Sadness American cheese and white bread and Bugles on fingers like dragon claws And the high school defensive end who grew up to go to Harvard and take my Zoloft so he wouldn’t run out of his own. And that’s in my American medical record now because I […]
Nonfiction from Beth Bilderback
Photo: Matthias Heyde Disaster Lover (June, 2020) A match lights a spark, the final straw, and blows up centuries of rage. One section of the Sunday New York Times reads simply, “The World is Broken.” My son wanders out into the city late one night and experiences tear gas for the first time, sees the […]
