Poetry

Poetry

Featured image for ““Ephemera,” “Provence,” and “Fortis & Fugues””
Featured image for ““Elegy to Jack Kerouac,” “Elegy for Amelia Earhart,” and “Among the Ruins””
Featured image for ““Mythos,” “Echidna, as depression,” and “Hereditary””
Featured image for ““Reckoning,” “Crowned by the Crowd,” and “The Turning””
Featured image for ““the bears bound this way,” “upstate,” and “the burn pit””
Featured image for ““Effortless,” “Hypothetically,” and “Uncelebrated””
Featured image for ““Truth,” “Travel,” and “Death””

Short Story

Featured image for “Sharks and Sirens”

Carrie O’Brien

Sharks and Sirens

Marilyn’s sharpest memories were shaped like five in the morning, dark silhouettes moving across a cold house with curved, sleep-deprived back and cyclical possibilities. Her mother in this same house, padding through the kitchen in her thick socks as she packed. Coffee in the thermos, breakfast in the pail. She kept her boots outside the door, and Marilyn watched her from the loft in their little A-frame house, her body wedged between two of her brothers in the bed they all shared.
Featured image for “The Crook And The Conspirator And The Wild Card”

Joe Kilgore

The Crook And The Conspirator And The Wild Card

Color, like life, can be enigmatic. It often attracts, frequently lulls, and sometimes tricks one into assuming one thing while the opposite is actually in play. Take the lush carpet that covers so much of the jungle floor throughout Cambodia. Its mesmerizing greens of sugar palms and high grass seemingly mingle innocently with purple cockscombs, yellow rumduol, and red hibiscus. One would surely think such beauty is indicative of the peace and serenity that resides there.
Featured image for “The Pendulum”

Parul Kaushik

The Pendulum

Boisterous cab drivers, chewing betel, buzzed around the queue at the pre-paid taxi counter of Agra Cantonment Railway Station, detailing the attractions of Agra to tourists. Shipra strutted across the station facade, halting the crawling taxis with her outstretched hand, before joining her father in the queue. Her poise and ease generated the impression of a native used to honking scooters and howling taxi drivers.
Featured image for “Midnight Strings”

Jeffery Thompson

Midnight Strings

I sat up from my coffin as the church bells began to ring. My tiny mausoleum remained much the same as the night before: the stone slab of my coffin sat turned at an angle, allowing me to sit up and take my evening walkabouts. Dead leaves and detritus littered the floor, mingling with mouse droppings, spiders, and the refuse of nature that wind blows into such spaces.
Featured image for “Undertone”

M.C. Blandford

Undertone

Beck watched fat freckles and swelling blisters burgeon across her girlfriend’s face and shoulders on their seventh day stranded in their emergency dinghy. A speck lost somewhere on the Pacific Ocean.
On the first night, as the adrenaline from the crash ebbed, Beck watched Bea’s eyes grow heavy before slumping against the stiff, inflated side of the dinghy. Beck tried to rid her girlfriend of the shivers coursing through her body as the temperature plummeted, but it was no use.
Featured image for “Pancho & Franz”

E.P. Lande

Pancho & Franz

Pancho grew up in Texas, which accounts for the name he assumed. Franz was born and raised in Baltimore, which doesn’t. They met at college somewhere in the Midwest, where Pancho majored in narcissism, and Franz, in egocentricity.
Pancho and Franz had one strong trait in common, a characteristic that drew them to one another, bonded them such that they became inseparable — and that was self-love.
Featured image for “She Doesn’t Remember”

Alnaaze Nathoo

She Doesn’t Remember

Her phone buzzed: Lia pulled it out of her pocket to check the incoming message, expecting a meme, or a friend sending pictures from her latest walk. It was not. “I was there this morning: she’s refusing to take her meds, and she’s yelling at the nurses again. Called the doctor a benchod.” It was a message in the family group chat.
Featured image for “The Righteous Indignation of Colonel Salvador Garcia”

Sandro F. Piedrahita

The Righteous Indignation of Colonel Salvador Garcia

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Salvador García was to remember that distant afternoon when he had witnessed the slaughter of the pipil natives and had said nothing. For years he had assuaged his conscience by telling himself it was the Indian rebels who had instigated the violence, that it was his obligation as a Colonel in the Salvadoran Army to quash the rebellion. After all, it was the pipil peoples who had provoked the two-day war by fiercely attacking the white landowners, burning down their homes and executing entire families in a frenzy of violence. What response did the Indian peasants expect, if not repression?
Featured image for “Confluence at Café Zurich”

Ken Janjigian

Confluence at Café Zurich

I had been plotting my escape from Valeria for many months before I actually did it. Maybe she was plotting as well, each of us secretly planning our way out. We were both exhausted from our near daily drama, like a marathoner in mile 25, but with no finish line. The fights had lost any real meaning. We were fighting because that’s what we did. Their only purpose was to provide the toxic nourishment that fuels dysfunctional relationships.

Essay

Featured image for “Baboquivari Blues”

Kirk Astroth

Baboquivari Blues

When you live in the desert, there is no sound sweeter than the gurgle of water—whether from a spring, a river, a pipe, a bottle, or even a 55-gallon water barrel like those we refill as volunteers with Humane Borders. It’s that deep-throated rolling sound that announces the flow of water from one place to another. A crisp sound, a cheerful woofling, a clear and noisy slurping that invites curiosity and excites desire. You are alive.
Featured image for “Black Lives on the Titanic”

Douglas Walters

Black Lives on the Titanic

The passengers of the Titanic were an ethnic mosaic of humanity. In the years following the sinking, the demographics of the great ship began to be studied and scrutinized. A documentary entitled The Six, about the Chinese passengers on board the ship, was released in 2020. James Cameron’s 1997 film also gave notice to the many languages and nationalities that had boarded. One question, however, kept coming up among historians, sociologists, and general Titanic enthusiasts such as myself: were there any Black people on the Titanic?

Nonfiction

Featured image for “Baboquivari Blues”

Kirk Astroth

Baboquivari Blues

When you live in the desert, there is no sound sweeter than the gurgle of water—whether from a spring, a river, a pipe, a bottle, or even a 55-gallon water barrel like those we refill as volunteers with Humane Borders. It’s that deep-throated rolling sound that announces the flow of water from one place to another. A crisp sound, a cheerful woofling, a clear and noisy slurping that invites curiosity and excites desire. You are alive.
Featured image for “Black Lives on the Titanic”

Douglas Walters

Black Lives on the Titanic

The passengers of the Titanic were an ethnic mosaic of humanity. In the years following the sinking, the demographics of the great ship began to be studied and scrutinized. A documentary entitled The Six, about the Chinese passengers on board the ship, was released in 2020. James Cameron’s 1997 film also gave notice to the many languages and nationalities that had boarded. One question, however, kept coming up among historians, sociologists, and general Titanic enthusiasts such as myself: were there any Black people on the Titanic?
Featured image for “Father Paul”

Toni Palombi

Father Paul

Amid the restrictions of COVID-19, Paul and I meet over Zoom. A priest, professor of law, husband and father, Paul greets me warmly, revealing his Canadian accent. Paul, who teaches law at the University of Adelaide, has recently been named the holder of the Bonython Chair in Law – the ninth Chair since the Law School’s establishment in 1883.
Featured image for “Puer Oblatus”

Aaron Buchanan

Puer Oblatus

The only person I ever punched in the face is dead. His name was Seneca, like the old Roman philosopher. About the time I read his obituary, I died too.
I was working night watch at a GM plant outside of Detroit and, thermos full of hot water and backpack full of teabags and textbooks, I attended university in the mornings. Nine a.m., Ancient Greek. Latin right after. Then some history classes. On a welcome spring break my senior year, I arranged to have my wisdom teeth removed.
Featured image for “Riley”

Clay Halton

Riley

Seventh grade was the year when the kids from the two elementary schools in our district all got piled into the Junior High building to begin middle school. It was a transition period for us children into young adulthood. Lockers, school bells, switching classes, and the dreaded “changing out” in gym class all awaited us.
Along with my fear of changing my clothes around my male peers in the locker room, I also began to fear most male interaction. I knew I couldn’t blend in with them, even if I didn’t know I was gay.