Poetry from Cliff Saunders
Photo: Krissia Cruz On Both Knees I want to make light bulbs flicker in every corner of a venerable house. I want a moth greener than a grocery store to hold moral high ground. I want to fix the confusion about salt and the unknown. I’m not going to blow this, and neither are caterpillars […]
Fiction from Jessica Sadler
Photo: Adam Solomon Baltimore Speak To describe this accent on paper is impossible except through seemingly unrelated comparisons: it sounds like a hand gliding up my thigh, starting at the knee and slowly gaining pressure midway at the meat of muscle and fat, then drawing a semi-circle with the thumb at the base of my […]
Poetry from Maggie Fulmer
Photo: Stéphan Valentin Out of Order I insert the dollar four times before I notice the sign. My mom isn’t around, but I can hear her – If you roll your eyes again, they’ll get stuck like that. The kids on the corner pretend the stone wall is a balance beam – gymnasts with cherry […]
Fiction from Jad Josey
Photo: Cherry Laithang It Finally Happened The sun dissolved into the sea today. It finally happened this time—it was not a metaphor for your fading love or a simile about your joy winking out like a light. The sun touched down, an inverted avalanche of steam cascading skyward as our best star tipped into the […]
Fiction from Soramimi Hanarejima
Photo: Luis Villasmil Safe Keeping After we switch reflections to see what that’s like, you leave the bathroom. I follow you into the kitchen where you fix us a snack. I guess you’re hungry and assume we’ll switch back later in the afternoon. We don’t. But that’s fine. I’m not particularly attached to my reflection […]
Fiction from Kim Magowan
Photo: Jong Marshes Cancel Culture It’s widely known that I never said “Let them eat cake.” What I said was brioche, and everyone knows this means bread. But because I was foreign, because I was young and rich and pretty, because my husband didn’t love me, because my husband was a fool, this story caught […]
Nonfiction from Eimear Laffan
Photo: Nasim Keshmiri Aspirational Self-Portrait as Reindeer and Fox In the beginning there’s a flimsy coat of snow on the brickwork porch outside my ground floor apartment, a copy of King Lear limp on the coffee table. Twitter reliably informs me that Shakespeare wrote the tragedy during the plague. I score a copy from the local library […]
Nonfiction from Sidney Dritz
Photo: Megan Markham I Miss My Nemesis It’s frivolous but my lease ends in September and I wanted one more summer with the pool just two blocks away, so close that I wouldn’t even need to decide to go swimming, I’d just let my feet have their way, barely stopping to slip into sandals on […]
Nonfiction from Gracie Beaver-Kairis
Photo: Andrej Lišakov Take Time to Stop and Wear the Roses The floral patterns have begun to bloom. I see them dangling suggestively from the end-caps of aisles at Target or Walmart while I rush by, my arms full of frozen dinners, a scarf twisted over my nose and mouth. I take them in like […]
Nonfiction from Kate Gehan
Photo: Brett Jordan The Small Sorrow of This Magnificent Body Last year I held out my prism when the Target cashier asked how I was, if it was still raining outside. The color spectrum fanned across the carton of milk on the belt, then bled all over the apples, the broccoli, the vitamins to keep […]
