Issue 24
Contents
- English 101 by Michael Alcée
- Oxford 1989 by P.Q.R. Anderson
- Untrimmed Hydrangeas by Madeleine French
- They Served Symbols by Marisa P. Clark
- How to Die in a Massacre on the American Frontier: by Charity Gingerich
- TIMELINE OF DISAPPEARANCES by February Spikener
- Citrus by Kimmy Chang
- Aaraam by Khushi Bajaj
- The World is a Brass Lamp Knob My Sister Swallowed Long Ago by Darby Myr
- Anthropocene by Sushant Malhotra
Fiction
I see you in my dreams. The whale of you swallows me whole. It sings its mournful songs into the unending blue. I reach for you. Don’t go. But you become nothing more than a speck, disappearing into the waves of time. *It was raining in Hokkaido, and the tarmac was slick. In the airport, […]My phone pings. It’s Witt. going to meeting tonight. promise. I put the phone in my back pocket, pick up my clippers, and go to work on Zeno. He’s a goldendoodle. His curls are a challenge, and goldendoodles can be a restless breed. But he stands still on the table, staring straight ahead as I […]Non-Fiction
In March of 2025, my stepfather gets on hospice, and I get on Feeld. Feeld’s supposed to be for kinky people. I don’t really know if I’m kinky. The definition of kinky is “to engage in unusual sexual behavior.” But who decides what counts as unusual? If your private instincts sit at odds with the […]1. The fog, first. 2. The way the bus from Pulkovo Airport pierced the heavy veil as we were taken to the dormitories. 3. How, on that drive my first night, there was darkness and density all around. I never could quite see through. 4. How it was 2018 and winter when I arrived. That […]Poetry
for Karen Shepard I was once a disturbanceand the world the water—sometime pond, often ocean—and that morning nobody was bitingon the question of Bishop’s fish,her words hung on the line, slack,terrible, tremendous, silent seaof existence, how could my professor—hardly thirty, black bob cut—not go under?After class, I bounded back to her officeto apologize for them, […]The artefacts of joy are somundane, as those of terror,the CO.T.RAL bus, my bootsand walking stick, the watermelonI was offered after lightning struck.And all that fear some simple errorof exhalation, microscopicregattas of serotonin, all that ilk,never to be called mundane. I breatheday in, night out. Some shoutcarries across the valley, someonerunning (it could be me) […]Ninety-two degrees.The pool deckshimmies and shineslike an opal carpet.Scorched sapphire globes fall,exhausted and spent.If they were elbows or kneesthey’d be scraped—a tang of blood wouldtease the humid air.Instead, my arms and legsgather freckles, whileemerald leavesshrivel and curlin the four o’ clock sun.Last year’s stiff stalkspoke up behind—angry words hidingin lush undergrowth.Dry and brown,a shade lighter […]Every time my Holiness friends said Join us?,I did. At their Sunday service, there was joyoussinging, clapping, stomping, all the hugging.Arms swayed overhead, faces shone heavenward,and everyone prayed out loud. They babbled in tonguesI mistook for Latin—I was so young—and someonealways got the interpretation. Shouts of Amenand Praise the Lord riddled the sermonwith exclamations. At […]How to Die in a Massacre on the American Frontier:
Based on the story of my ancestors, the Jacob Hochstetler family, and the massacre of 1757 Return good for evil. First, choose well your land: beautiful, tillable soil deep in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where “perhaps not a tree or bush had previously been removed,” where later skulking savage shadows will linger at the edge of […]age 24 Sat at your dying grandmother’s bedside, you paint her nails. A soft mauve, grey-tinged, almost like her skin now collapsing into her chest, like a slow-rotting plum, just two weeks after Mother’s Day, when she didn’t answer your call. You had never imagined this, kissing the mole of her left hand just at […]Sing me the lullaby where we collect fallen hairs from the pillows and sew them into our scalp again.The warmth of your ear and neck, the tickle of my fingers slipping under your clothes, reaching until you chide my childishness and take my cold hands.It’s like time closing its fist; each touch a small death—turning […]there is a big jhoola in our aanganwhich is sometimes caressedby the passing shadow of thefarthest growing leavesof our sixty-year-old ber treeit is here that i think ofbeing silent in each other’s presence-one narangi flower-patterned hand of yoursis holding tight to the jute stringto make sure we don’t pause mid-swingi think of your other handcaressing […]The World is a Brass Lamp Knob My Sister Swallowed Long Ago
It must have felt good in her mouthrolling it around with her toddler’s tonguethe way it fit between her gums and cheekclick-clacking against her milk teethYou must remember it thenthe way the world sloshed about with bravura,the salivating primordial slop of youthI don’t think we were innocent of the process even thenjust a different kind […]If only we had left home a tad earliermaybe we would have passedthe semi before it toppled,a burnt pine dropping deadin its tracks. It’s November,and the heat refuses to relent.The cellular signal too faintto tell my best friendI won’t make his wedding.A group of men in matchingkhaki shorts and lacrosse shirtscrack open cans of Coors […]Stage/Screen Writing
A Short Play Characters Sally Nicole Setting A coffee shop, morning “Hell is yourself and the only redemption is when a person puts himself aside to feel deeply for another person.” ~Tennessee Williams Two old friends are meeting to discuss Paul. Paul is very close to one of them, and has grown distant from the […]Bonnie and Regina Say Goodbye to Hope
Characters REGINA, late teens Mother to a four-week-old baby. Petulant, sarcastic, deliberate, an avid reader. She’s a smart kid. BONNIE, early 30s Regina’s aunt. Sanctimonious, judgmental, short-tempered, not an avid reader. Life has been unkind to her. Setting A small kitchen in a small house in a small town in the hot-and-humid Florida panhandle, somewhere between Gainesville and […]