When They Come

Tommy Dean
When they come, hold your hands above your head, don't look them in the eye, and don’t spit on their shoes. James is going to want his frayed fluorescent orange t-rex, but we march to the speed of those voices of the men with the guns. His lip will quiver, and his hands will tug at your shirt, but he’ll ... Read More

Gene Pool

Jennifer Hambrick
They call it zero entry, the way the surround leans into the water and becomes the bottom of the pool, slowly angling deeper and deeper beneath the water’s surface. This way, toddlers can reverse their lives and, guided by their mothers, ease from dry land into a worldly womb as wet as the ones they left behind, though much colder ... Read More

Triplewart Seadevil

Will Cordeiro
                                          Cryptopsaras couesii Down in the body-lit night-sodden sea, somber, sub umbra, I’m this tiny restless inchling, a mere appendage, a would-be hanger-on. Dimorphic nub-end, destined to be a rudder attached to some underside. I blunder the deeps—I nose around for this blubbering fish out of Bosch, mega- mouthed she-goblin, face flush with cicatrix, visage like the dehisced petals of ... Read More

Apology

Michael Mark
Each morning she swept stars from the wood floor, cursing as the bright bits scattered, and barked whenever I’d whine. Her list of reasons why I had no right to be unhappy landed like lashes. At the open door she bent and snapped the broom’s bristles—forbade the stars to return. I didn’t ask how they got inside our room—the cracks ... Read More

In the Old Packard 

Connemara Wadsworth
Maybe a hand-me-down from Uncle B, smells like a garage. Surely he’d found it, fixed it up, tinkered with it,

Night Blindness

Beth Konkoski
When you wake me I am blind, closed around the night and faded like the quilt, born of the black

Rumors

Charles Rammelkamp
When I read about Mike Tyson taking a psychedelic drug called 5-MeO-DMT, derived from toad venom, I remembered the rumors

Everything is the Same, Only Quieter

January Pearson
I push my dad past trimmed plots of Bermuda lawns orderly with hedges, hawthorn bushes bordering garage after garage unopened,

Bioluminescence in Newport Harbor

January Pearson
 When the water glints like onyx shushing the dock, empty sailboats huddle and rock, when a red-winged blackbird tricks

Den, the Vomitous 

Evelyn Somers
Isaac was in love with his T-shirt. It was pure, breathable cotton, size L, with sleeves that hit just below

Apprenticeship

John Amen
My brother & I memorized our parents’ epic – their screams & grunts – mastering that pidgin of volatility. We

Direction

Francine Witte
Like a bloodstream cell that only knows its way to the heart, or the waves flowing oceanward, beachward for a

I Think I Did It Wrong

Michael Mark
University. Waverly. I kept saying the street names in my head. Greene.  Astor. So I’d know how to get back

Child’s Play

Linda Murphy Marshall
One by one, Kate picks up photographs from the piles of mostly black-and-white shots strewn around her on her parents’

Judy In The Sky With Toxic Masculinity

CL Bledsoe, Michael Gushue
Judy invented this sport where she loaded a herd of cattle onto a cargo plane and took it up to

Hopper Man

Lucy Simpson
 (“Me only cruel immortality consumes…” Alfred Tennyson, Tithonus)  Grasshopper stoops; his shadow, an elephant holding a parasol, plods along achromatic

Faking It

Adam Tavel
A dug-up corpse could wear your favorite shirt face-down on the gorge’s scrubby floor beside the burning s’more your flipped

The Things You Wear

Stephanie Dupal
You stand near the arboretum gate, your hip against the ornamental rock etched with the resonant words of a conservationist.

Gyroscope

Mark Crimmins
For a couple of years I didn’t use the rope. It was one of those revenge presents. My relationship with

Into the Mystic

Kay White Drew
“Head up,” my father says softly as my eyes open. His dream-voice sounds just like his real voice did fifty-plus

Interview with Maureen Pilkington

Nathan Leslie
Maureen Pilkington’s fiction has appeared in anthologies, journals and magazines including The Antioch Review, Ploughshares, Puerto del Sol, Confrontation, Bridge: Art &

Interview with Reuben Jackson

Nathan Leslie
Reuben Jackson served as curator of the Smithsonian’s Duke Ellington Collection in Washington, D.C. for over twenty years. His music reviews have

Melanie’s Song by Joanna Biggar

Charles Rammelkamp
A sequel to her 2010 novel, That Paris Year, which followed five California girls on their junior year abroad, in