by Rod Raglin | Mar 31, 2024 | Fiction, Issue #6, Issues
The bus is late. The afternoon sun is merciless. “Bad accident,” one of the dozen of us waiting announces without looking up from studying the screen of his cell phone. “Bus had to be rerouted.” “How long?” a woman asks, futilely fanning herself with an envelope from...
by John Grey | Mar 31, 2024 | Issue #6, Issues, Poetry
This is the lake and the grassy bank where Paula and I sat together, mesmerized by water and its connection to our touching heads. Here is where willows dipped their outer branches to sip and mallards cruised the rippling surface. Here occurred kisses I remember as...
by Kait Quinn | Mar 31, 2024 | Issue #6, Issues, Poetry
after Dorianne Laux’s “The Mysterious Human Heart in New York” Aureate but spurred, the heart straps on her boots, bears the stickers, stomps away copperheads to catch her golden hour dalliance with the bluebonnets before evening mosquitos eclipse...
by summa iru | Mar 31, 2024 | Issue #6, Issues, Poetry
the field is barren but for the bloom of this horse and its iridescent pubes fluttering like shirts pinned to a clothesline elsewhere the horse is a comma in the middle of its own pause, or say a leaf in the ripple of its fall— is it not mightier than a crashing...
by Svetlana Sterlin | Mar 31, 2024 | Issue #6, Issues, Poetry
Put a raisin cake in the oven, and it’s very small. Then you let it go, and the distance between the raisins is like the distance between the galaxies—it gets larger and larger with time. —Neta Bahcall mix the dry ingredients. make a well in the middle. imagine diving...
by Thomas Larson | Mar 31, 2024 | Craft, Issue #6, Issues
I’ve been on a journey the past five years that some writers who come tantalizingly close to publication know all too well. From 2018-2022, I worked on a novel, paid thousands to a professional editor, another thousand for a lawyer’s opinion of my legal liability, and...
by Veronica Zora Kirin | Mar 31, 2024 | Craft, Issue #6, Issues
“I can’t remember a time when the publishing industry, like other institutions devoted to the arts … didn’t come down on the side of fashion and power.” — Hilton Als When my recent short story was accepted for publication, I was delighted. The hard work was over; it...
by L. Shapley Bassen | Mar 31, 2024 | Fiction, Issue #6, Issues
Deborah lost her wallet. Most of us have at one time or another. It’s one of the awful feelings, that moment when you know you don’t know. Or the last time you knew… anything. It swallows you, that feeling. Utter loss. Utter failure. All the work it will take to...
by Maddy Sneep | Mar 31, 2024 | Issue #6, Issues, Poetry
We drove out west tothe wealthy part of townto drink fancy beer andeat tiny portions andplay make-believe. On this side of town, the McDonald’s isn’t red, but forest-green withexposed brick, likean old university halllikely named for someslave-owningconfederate...
by Maddy Sneep | Mar 31, 2024 | Issue #6, Issues, Poetry
A rabbit hops into my bathroom, chugsmy pharmaceutical jungle juice and passes out cold. I wouldn’t know whatthat’s like because I run hot. I don’t sleep well at all but I dream every night. Lostlocker combinations and classes left unattended by the end of the year....
