Poetry

Featured image for ““Cartography” and “Front Row””
Featured image for ““404[Snow],” “Equinox Lily,” and  “Unknown Algorithm””
Featured image for ““A Photo of a Father Holding His Young Son,” “Soapbox Row,” and “Museé Rodin””
Featured image for ““Defining Divinity,” “Gallop Arrested,” and “A Journey – Steering to the North””
Featured image for ““The First Clothes,” “Telenovela,” and “Cardea Comes Tumbling””
Featured image for ““The Soft Apocalypse,” “Alluding Perusing,” and “Outré””
Featured image for ““Cosmetic Concern,” “Sufficient Fate,” and “Never Considered””
Featured image for ““Funeral Blues,” “Past’s Dreamland,” “Funeral Parlour’s Instructions””
Featured image for ““The Enigmatic Life of Clara Sandoval,” “The Regime,” and “Tanka Number Three””

Short Story

Featured image for “Die Dubbel”

Samuel Totten

Die Dubbel

Home after a long, hard day at work, Pieter Bakkes took a quick shower, pulled on some civvies, turned on the television, switched on the news, grabbed the day’s newspaper from an end table, and plopped down on the couch in his family’s living room. When a commercial about Lion Lager came on, he hopped up and headed into the kitchen to get a cold bottle of the beer.
Featured image for “Joaquín”

Elisa Maiz

Joaquín

Tuesday night, a group of sicarios abducted Juan José Juárez, his wife, and two children in Colonia Los Duendes. Drugs and weapons were found in a bunker hidden behind the living room of the suburban house, tying Juárez to the Baja Cartel. Joaquín Velasco, a neighbor, is also missing.
“Joaquín went to play video games with Manuel, the youngest son,” María Velasco, Joaquín’s mother, explained. “He played over there all the time. We had no idea of Juan Manuel’s drug trafficking. We’d known them for years.”
Featured image for “Leo”

Michelle Lowes

Leo

Leo positioned the stylus gently on the vinyl record, delighting in the peculiar little crackle signifying the start. The inexpensive turntable was his first purchase when he arrived in New York, and it made his dorm room cozier. He swung his legs up on the bed and pillowed his hands behind his head. A piano, followed by a violin, playing “Yo Soy Maria” by Piazzolla, an Argentinian composer.
Featured image for “Never Never”

H.C. Gildfind

Never Never

I’ve spent weeks painting these walls. Spent weeks painting this shack, inside and out. Spent weeks, now, learning this place: this house, this garden, this street, this town. Already, I’ve memorised the view from the end of my road: a ravaged curve of mountainous coast crooked around the edge of the bay; a bay that opens out to the ocean; an ocean that pours into the southern hemisphere which makes up the bottom half of this godforsaken world.
Featured image for “Ancient Ritual”

Tim Jones

Ancient Ritual

Mike was mean as a snake, except when she decided she wasn’t. Then she was sweet as pie. She could be an in-between kind of nice too, but that was mostly for waitresses and old ladies and neither of us ever found that very interesting. Mike was beautiful, stunning actually, and understood the leverage this gave her with both sexes, though it was the advantage she pressed least.
Featured image for “The Three Marys”

Michael Maschio

The Three Marys

A second weather alert convinces Mary Carruci, the executive director of Camp Rapture, to shine her flashlight at the rain pelting the river. Crossing a puddle in sneakers, shorts and a tank top, she tilts her umbrella toward the wind and heads from her office to the road, where lightning reveals the river’s steady flow. She follows the asphalt up to the bridge and stops breathing when a sheet of water rounds the bend and skirts the river’s surface.
Featured image for “Spring Bloom in Saguaro National Park”
Featured image for “Essence of Nature”

Michael Roberts

Essence of Nature

In the last several months, I have been exploring minimalism as a way of projection and abstraction in my photography. The simplicity of minimalism reduces nature to its essence to reveal the underlying beauty of structure and form. These three images were made while hiking trails in the Sonoran Desert.

Long Short Story

Featured image for “Yitzel”

Sandro F. Piedrahita

Yitzel

The sixteen-year-old Yitzel was getting restless in the long queue at the entrance to the Portuguese embassy in Berlin. It was so very hot and crowded in the noonday sun, and she felt a great thirst, a sweaty forehead, and an intense need to defecate. She and her mother Yolande had been waiting in line for over five hours, and Yitzel couldn’t understand why her mother was so bent on getting what she called a “visa” to Portugal or to any of its colonies. Yolande had explained that a “visa” was a special permission to travel to any part of the Portuguese empire, including colonies in both Africa and Asia, but Yitzel didn’t quite understand what the words “empire” or “colony” meant.
Featured image for “The House”

James Anderson

The House

The house always wins. Anyone who tells you differently has never played a game for money in their lives. You bet a small, relatively safe, amount and a win may come or it may not. Doesn’t matter to you because you only played sixty cents per game. So, you play again. Pull the slot. Roll the dice. Spin the wheel. Call for the next card.
But you lose.
Oh well, it’s only sixty cents. But now you’re in for a dollar twenty because you play again. Time passes and fifty tries later, you’re down thirty dollars. Not an awful lot but it was still money that could have gone into the gas tank. But you’re sure you’ll break even because sometimes you do win. Of course you do. That’s just how they get you to come back.

Creative Nonfiction

Featured image for “Transcendence, Interrupted”

Luis Chamorro

Transcendence, Interrupted

As a child, I believed I was special. I grasped complex ideas quickly, asked questions about reality that my peers never considered, and felt destined for greatness.
But as I grew older, life had a way of dissolving those ideas. Not that I was unhappy—I had a great wife, great kids, joyful moments—but something was missing. A dull ache in my chest, a heaviness in my eyes—surfacing at odd moments, unbidden.
Featured image for “The Backseat Is Full”

Randi Schalet

The Backseat Is Full

On Dana Street in North Berkeley, unhoused men and women huddled under a church awning in the morning downpour. I looked away, then forced myself to cross the street, raising my voice over the pounding rain.
“This weather is awful,” I said, shivering, water running under my collar, trying to sound casual, though I likely came across as what I was: guilty and entitled.
Featured image for “We Are Never Truly Alone”

Joseph Dubois

We Are Never Truly Alone

In Richmond, the trees are not where they should be. In their gangly adolescence, each was planted in a rectangular bed along the curb; situated 40 feet apart, the beds leave ample space for the canopies to spread, but measuring six-by-eight-foot, they are perhaps too small for the lower half. The roots of the oldest trees, older than the inhabitants who live indoors, have extended from their little box and into the sidewalks, creating fault lines for us to leap over.