Issue: Summer 2022

by John Dorroh Last night you dreamed about me cleaning out the basement, dispersing heart dust into the atmosphere, aggravating my asthma, detritus settling in my morning coffee cup. You said I shook it off and cooked chicken wings in the oven with three different sauces. My next-door neighbor with the 8-inch cock stole my […]

by Cameron Morse   Thunder creaks in the crawlspace. The house speaks to me nights I have trouble sleeping, its tongue pierced by nails. Lightning haunts my window, lightning without rain. If only I could sleep and be healed, sleep without dreams. Breathe without dread. But I am on my hands and my knees always […]

by Tom Barlow   How would you feel if it were your head reshaped as a butternut squash, your nose grafted onto your forehead, eyes beady and wandering like pinballs, and all dressed up in the skin of the drowned? Was that tenderness or disrespect that guided his brush to rip into those faces and […]

by CL Bledsoe   I’ve died here before. I’ve died here and kept stumbling toward that place where everyone is safe. I’ve seen it on tee-shirts. I hear helicopters, but they aren’t for me. You were the only way I could rise. Don’t leave me with the moon for my only friend. It’s cold and […]

by Jeff Hardin   The wrong son died, my mother hissed. So many days I’ve tried to live to let go of who I might have been if I had stayed. My brother has no grave, no age. There were families I didn’t belong to, still don’t. Much I don’t want was never offered anyway. […]

by Barry Wallenstein   Passing by a mirror, he pays no attention and gazes in the other direction. He pushes forward without looking back. It’s enough to know it’s there he thinks; placing one small thought behind another, he banishes envy, spite, rancor and courts a breeze on its way across a field of heather. […]

by John Reed   You and I are everywhere but here. Down on Gansevoort at the swanky bar, the cherrystone clams are ready for us, on ice on a platter, on the half shell– and the sprinklers time-on at the great lawn– and an orange skirt is somewhere walking– and drivers are adjusting their mirrors. […]

by Pamela L. Laskin   Going to grow a gorgeous garden with wisteria blooming between begonias and roses ripe with longing. I had the seeds, the soil. All was ripe for blossoming. even the way I measured the distance between where the seeds were planted. How could I have known the heat was venomous, the […]

by Susana H. Case   I was nineteen in Ohio. Mornings, the phone rang with my assignment. I’d run down the hill to catch the bus— a different school most mornings— clutching a bag of M&M’s for lunch. Principals said, just keep the students quiet. Poor Maurice—same size as me, but mentally a six-year-old—all deficits […]

by David M. Katz   There are so many things you do not like But cannot change yourself. You are a mule That will not leave its stall. Your bones ache. You’re when and what you are. You are no fool, But neither are you smart. You make demands, You dictate how we talk about […]