Poetry from Douglas Cole
Photo: Bluesnap Zen Painting The land goes on forever you might say with a blue sliver river through it white-face rock crops sun devils and heat devils anvil cloud updrafts and hawks riding on thermals no trail no road no town just pinyon and scrub brush dust and feral eyes chittering chipmunks and snakes like […]
Poetry from Sara Marron
Photo: Thomas Kinto Wide Awake, Wondering if Ants Have Hearts I just wanna be friends I tell you after class We are both so exhausted And measuring the seconds left Before we can undress separately You hang your head out the window “Isn’t this what dogs do?” I laugh and say yes yes, you dog […]
Poetry from Laurel Radzieski
Photo: raw pixel Reasons That a Person Would Have for Cutting Off the Tops of the Tulips and Leaving Them Where They Fell The tulips were yellow. The culprit was beheaded in a recent past life. A young boy thought he had found a stunning gift for his mother but upon receival she made him […]
Nonfiction and Art from Natalie Vestin
Four Sleepscapes “There is always a split between fragments that are real and fragments that are virtual, between memory and fantasy. These splits have no existence other than being the passage from one fragment to another. They are relays rather than signs. They are traces. They are in-between.” Bernard Tschumi from Architecture and Dysjunction One […]
Nonfiction from Natalia Conte
Photo: Jon Tyson If We Speak of Memories “To let people begin again. It’s beautiful. You look at a baby and it’s so pure, and so free and so clean. And adults are like this mess of sadness.” – Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Tucked into the artistic downtown stretch of Greensboro, North Carolina […]
Nonfiction from Andrew Rihn
Photo: raw pixel Tyson vs. Alderson Jul 11, 1985 Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino, Atlantic City, New Jersey, U.S. Avoid the why, begin with the how. Description before motivation. As messy as storytelling. Joyce Carol Oates will go on to call him a savior, of sorts, legendary before there is a legend to define him, while […]
Fiction from Emma Rose Gowans
Photo: Mahkeo I Left the Desert I’m calling mi padre on the old blue landline. I read a conspiracy theory once that our private conversations are secretly recorded as soon as we begin a call. That’s how the FBI tracks landlines—how everything you say on a landline is fair game because that’s how landlines work […]
Poetry from Pamela Taylor
Photo: Ivana Cajina How to Get Emotional Distance When Voodoo is Not an Option March in circles until his words dizzy and fall out of your ears. Heap those sighs and secrets into a glass jar and leave them out in the sun. The bright light will purify any microbes left behind. Let your inner […]
Fiction from Anu Kumar
Photo: Yiqun Tang The City’s Last Mill The city’s last cotton mill was aging rapidly. Already its roof was spliced in half, windows in empty sheds stood bare with an old man’s toothless grin. Rubble gathered in new places every time the demolition team pulled down buildings that no longer fitted into plan. On other […]
Nonfiction from Christopher Valdheims
Photo: Valentin Müller The Cathedral Where, dear God, Will you sojourn after we all die? You have no father, nor dear mother, Not your own dear brothers. – Traditional Latvian verse I was the child of exiles. Born on the streets, and now I was back. Back where? Back here. Back here at the edge […]
