In This Issue
The Prison in Lebanon
The empty prison in Lebanon has become the cold winter hotel of women and children who ran away from the burning bullets, the splatter of fire, the heavy bodies. They have come to the only shelter that the torn curtain (Sunni, Shiite, Christian) can bring....
Greg Headley
Greg Headley Greg Headley is an artist, photographer, and writer in Austin, Texas. His artwork and photography explore where intention and randomness intersect and the ways that chance can influence and even change the course of the work.
Scott McDaniel
An I-40 Road Song Rusting roof top words invite us to change course and See Rock City. On the radio, “American Pie” crashes into static. I’m on my back in the back, watching the traffic of tree branches pass. Mom tells Dad to slow. I-40 is an infinite...
On Hearing ‘Happy Mother’s Day’ When You Don’t Have Kids
after Reginald Shephard’s “My Mother Was No White Dove” I am not a Mom yet Mom’s what they think. I am a woman and Mom’s what they see. Adults write about their mothers as if composing a greeting card. Their mothers are kind, supportive an...
It’s 1938 Again
it’s 1938 again, glass shatters shards scatter, lives don’t matter state sponsored murder sanctioned and the constituents celebrate and the constituents applaud toxic rallies continue hot coals are thrown into boiling pots of ignorant meltdown ignited and the...
Gone
My husband and I go to the church craft fair. We are surprised because my mother is there. Her booth is in the corner. She is selling crocheted baby blankets and baby beanies. We don't think it's her at first. The booth is draped in black. Her products are black, too....
Catherine Roberts Leach
Catherine Roberts Leach Catherine Roberts Leach was born in New York City and lived and worked in Los Angeles before moving to Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her fine art photography has appeared in solo and group exhibitions in galleries across the United States from...
Dave Sims
Dave Sims After 30+ years of teaching in colleges, universities, military bases, and prisons from Alaska to Louisiana, Dave Sims retired to the mountains of central Pennsylvania where he now dwells and creates. His most recent comix appear in The Nashville...
Andy Posner
In Whose Custody the Flags? The flags are at full-staff Though Jackeline is dead Of dehydration And the Guatemalan boy whose name Has not been released Is dead Of the flu— They died in our custody. The flags remain at full-staff, Their stars going dim with...
Spring Kicks In
City highways take the future around the bend of the river of money. Women assume further control. The next human world aims its nuclear torpedoes, as transcontinental jets haunt the place, taking off and landing on autopilot. Sons decide they’re daughters, while the...
March
March As in, pick up your mud-crusted boots and move along. Forward, onward. Stopping to ponder one’s thoughts could lead to a frozen death, a swampy drowning. March As in, the January memory of one million bodies filling the DC green (not green at all), the wind cold...
Meeting with the H.R. Department
“I’m sorry, your position is being eliminated,” she said, handing me the divorce papers. “Do you think I’ll just accept this lying down?” I asked. She smiled, impartially, waiting. “You’re not really eliminating my position,” I said. “If you were joining a nunnery...
The Man in the Hat
She sensed when he’d show up. She’d turn her head and look out the window. There he’d be 3 floors down in the parking lot. The man in the hat. Tall, almost lanky. Black hat – she wasn’t sure the term – Boiler? Brimmed? Felt? Always. Sometimes with a vest. Sometimes a...
Mitzvah
Feral iris bloom peach and blue and cream, and sweet-tempered purple violas, and a busy chipmunk digdigdigs up the mint and basil and thyme, little bastard. He skitter-pops on quick feet over the mulch while the sun rises through one soft smoky exhale. In the house,...
Blueshift
I have waking-nightmares of you falling out of the sky. NASA rings me. I think it’s spam, but they know I trust NORAD, so they have me call the mountain nearby and ask for some general by name to confirm. A private jet flies me to the Kennedy Space Center where all...
Mailbox Number Eight
Every time I check the mail, I see the name of a martyr that France has wept since most of us stood united in early 2015 behind a sentence that started with “Je suis.” His name in proper spelling, with its final T, printed on a white rectangular label made by the...
William Doreski
Dynamite Always Brightens a Dumbfounded Winter Day On the road to the marsh I find a stick of dynamite, blasting cap attached. It must have fallen off a truck. I toss the stick into a snowbank, retreat two hundred yards, trigger it with telepathy. The blast...
Arthur Plotnik, Featured Author
Please Hold Your Answers "...the answer to the future will be in knowing how to ask the right questions." --Quentin Hardy Answers are finished, washed up. Once the noble deep-sea creatures who fought until you reeled them in, now they...
.22
I am my father’s hardest bullet. Buckshot sperm bored out from the barrel that birthed me. I was born Valentine’s Day, 1989, and every three hundred and sixty-fifth day I have been gifted a bullet of different caliber. They sit arranged on shelves the way a hunter...
Backstory
You kiss Ryan Gosling at El Cid on one of those smoking terraces that overlook the canyon below Sunset Boulevard. You have both been catcalling the flamenco dancers and sharing cigarettes like you and your best friend used to on the patio of the coffee shop in Los...
Tony Tracy
Pops, Dis Playa Need Ta Roll They leave home singing, return home singing, iPhones providing a soundtrack to their days as they overdub the lyrics with an aggressive, more frenzied version of their own. But singing is not right, not in the technical sense of...
Julia’s Hair
It was the first class of the morning. Five of six new students sat around the table, propped upright in their plastic garden chairs, attentive and ready to work. So far so good. Then the sixth student arrived. She had long, long black hair. She said nothing, set a...
Woman, Silent
My mother said, “It’s ok to say no.” I needed a cup from my grandmother’s cupboard, but I was four, unable to reach. My aunt grabbed me by the waist, cupping my bottom the way a swing set holds the body of small children. She hoisted me up to reach the cup, but I...
Popeye
When Uncle Sam shoots his gun, does a flag pop out? If so, whose flag is it, anyway? When Uncle Sam shoots his gun, does his Cornucopian hat pop open? If so, do birds fly out? What kind of birds are they? When Uncle Sam shoots his gun, does he lose his trousers? What...
The Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara
“What caravan did the Thousand Oaks shooter [terrorist] come from?” - Don Lemon (to Trump) Recent news ended, Terrorists suspected. Among the frenzied crowd cued in Harvest Bakery's...
Book of Life
Sister, it’s flooding sunshine. Days drop like caramels. I turned my back on you, the hunted dogs of our girlhood. Here’s the devil coming from my palm, the mad raisins and relished dirt. I’m in the open, the cream soda bad. Is rubber your only feeling? Wooded and...
Breaking News
Mother earth is off the wagon. According to reliable eye witnesses, She’s been drinking again: Hammered on Greenland ice melt, Falling down drunk from glacial rebound, Knocked off her axis from mantel convection. When this reporter confronted her About her...
visions from “high” country: our So. Cal. so-called makeshift decompression chamber
If This Is Paradise Why Are We Still Driving -- Brendan Lorber, June 2018 on the occasion of my seventy-third birthday celebration, having finally begun to learn some rules of paved roads ‘stead of taking usual straightshot hellbent damn 405 freeway...
Trash Food
You take a memory and a healthy dollop of salted butter take a swig of cheap flat beer and plop a slab of date expired ham or chicken like your great grandmother did after showing you the pin cushion and how to darn a sock or make a doily soft light through porthole...
raft
i am drowning under a raft of history. i have nothing but tanager trills in the dark, a handful of wildflowers, an ineffective rage. i’m tired of growing vegetables that die every year and must be endlessly restarted by hand -- i want a yard burgeoning with blossoms,...
Daniel Edward Moore
King Erasure At your intervention which was nothing more than a pageantry of post it notes stained by a ballpoint’s opium ink dangling on an inch of yellow adhesive stuck to your armored chest,...
Control
The sound is faint, like the low grumble of an old man in his sleep, constant and all- pervasive—a unitary oscillating auditory net that suppresses spontaneous impulses and curbs undesirable actions. Holographic images in staggering colors pulse through the...
Vanishing Point (October Vignette)
on the bus, after we heard the news, I saw a woman softly sobbing into her hands; beside her was a Whole Earth shopping bag containing what must be heirloom or designer apples that were almost orange in color – perhaps a miniature pumpkin, if such a thing exists – and...
Nicolas Ridley, Featured Author
Virtually Identical FICTION ‘I shan’t introduce you to my sister,’ said Kate. ‘You’ll fall in love with her. Then I’ll have to hate you.’ ‘Fine,’ I said. (I’m used to Kate’s pronouncements.) We were driving to Sussex. Having decided to marry me, Kate felt I...
Jane Hammons taught writing for three decades at UC Berkeley, where she received a Distinguished Teaching Award. Upon retirement, she moved to Austin, Texas, for five years before returning home to New Mexico. Her writing appears in numerous journals and anthologies: Alaska Quarterly Review, Southwestern American Literature, The Main Street Rag, Yellow Medicine Review, Hint Fiction, (Norton), The EastOver Anthology of Rural Writers of Color, 2023 and 2024, The Maternal is Political (Seal Press), and Selected Memories, (Hippocampus Books). She enjoys photography as part of her writing practice, and three of her photographs are included in Taking It To the Streets: A Visual History of Protest and Demonstration, an exhibition of the Austin History Center. She is an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation.
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Michael C. Roberts is a retired pediatric psychologist and professor. He has digital and film photographs in Burningword, The Canary, The Storms, FERAL, Cholla Needles, Cantos, The Healing Muse, Cold Moon, Right Hand Pointing, Door is a Jar, Camas, Hindsight, Straylight, Thimble, Ponder, Closed Eye Open, Alchemy Spoon, 3rd Wednesday, The Right Words, Cardinal Sins, Human Obscura, Blue Mesa Review, The Word’s Faire, and elsewhere. In his recent photography, he has been exploring minimalism as projection and abstraction. The simplicity of minimalism reduces both nature and the human-made to their basics, revealing the essential beauty in structure and form. Although austere, these silhouetted images of nature allow the viewer to appreciate the world’s simple complexity and basic beauty.
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