Two Poems by James Crews
On a hillside outside of Tokyo, / a man has built a glass booth / with a disconnected rotary phone / for calling lost relatives, / for speaking to the dead.
Online Edition
Poetry
Three Poems by Michael Castro
These poems originally appeared in the first three issues of River Styx. The River The river rises to unprecedented levels. Tree tops prick the surface. The water seeps under doors, over windows,swallows...
Flower Flower
O I could fill a cinema. Bent road of jade birds' loft bed rain ruining the mountain and my own little hooves beating a repeating question. In winter. Ordinary life....
Two Poems by Adam Edelman
Help Desk All is not lost, in my opinion.Something in the way of how anything can happen ends up meaning most anything doesn’t, and did you ever notice it never...
Fiction
Four Prepositions
That was the old game of the fathers. To construct infinity from an itch. Only God could see his own bald spot, and even He never saw it from above.
Guest of Honor
Katya Apekina's second novel, Mother Doll, from which this piece is excerpted, is available to order from Overlook Press. ____ Creating stresses in the social fabric was one of...
The Last Thursday of the Century
“The dead body you have left unburied, unwept, unsepulchred; but the living body you have thrust below the earth, in a living tomb.” –Antigone As winter nears its end,...
Strays
I. There was something in the way the kid worked, as if pushing around stacks of pressure-treated two by sixes in the heat wasn’t actually hard, as if the wood...
Nonfiction
Feminine Nihilistic Gospel Song
For the first six months of the pandemic, I embraced a monastic lifestyle. I walked daily through a five-acre nature preserve a few blocks from my house in Spokane,...
Riding the Music Wave with Joe Holt
A few years back I had a weekly radio show called North Star Nugs, on which I played jam bands, jazz, and improvisational music. In preparing this playlist for River...
Landscape Anxiety
John Gardner says there are two plots: man goes on a journey and a stranger comes to town. In Ellensburg, I’m doing both. I took the job because I needed...
Riding the Music Wave with Brandon Hobson
Because serious art is where complex and difficult questions are made human and uncomfortable in a time when most people don't like to feel uncomfortable, I can only say that...