Three Poems by V. Joshua Adams
Apophrades Freud says when you go to bed with someoneyou are really going to bed with their parents,and they with yours. It’s like this sometimes with poems, too,even if you...
Online Edition
Poetry
Five Poems by Ellen Boyette
A stabbing pain, refrain, my abs / from running thickets through / the core, an apple, saccharine, / in leaves like lamb’s ears, queer / again, to grab at lungs like lace.
Etiology
That AME graveyard in Backwater, Md.inhabits an eighty-foot by eighty-footplot of blighted grass between the landscapedlots of three squat prefabs and a beveledtier of emerald soy.
Five Poems by Jake Fournier
If you forget your friends, even if you forget them all
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.
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...
Four Poems by Alicia Rebecca Myers
January I am too much in my body.Mornings spent wishing for optical science and invisibility cloaks.I dream of being pregnant again, even as I sweat through next-stageluster.The iced-over lake makes...
Fiction
Lest She Go Off
When dad left to go live with a Ruby Tuesday’s waitress, the house felt dank and cavernous—like an empty dragon’s lair where helpless worms wriggled about, wondering what to do...
from Counting
The old woman begs him to shoot it. The dog has bitten several chickens and now the young calf. They pen it up, watch the disease take hold.
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...
Branches of the Service
The attaché looked out the window and knew that something was wrong about the wing. He absolutely knew. But he couldn’t say what he knew other than he knew and...
Cyprus
Cyprus was my Amazonas. Humidity uprooted all kinds of fragrances from the scorched earth and hung them in the air like clothes on the line. Humidity, then aridity. It messed...
Nonfiction
Coda
When it happened, I suddenly recalled the expression split in two. It was six in the morning and I had been laboring for twelve hours. The sun was almost up. We...
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...
Kin
J. Gee (1913-1975) In my family, there was a woman who knew how to fly. She had been pushed by a man, or perhaps the man’s wife, or perhaps the...
Common Sense
Before I left NYC to live in western South Dakota I did not know how much I did not know—that prairie grass undulates and shines like ocean waves in the...
Fractals
0. Every year on my birthday, my mom tells my birth story. In the middle of labor, she left her body and floated up to the ceiling then looked down...
