In This Issue
Hoplophobia
A morbid fear of guns whose array of co-morbidities encompass suppressed rage post-traumatic stress disorder delusional disorder and panic disorder this complex specific phobia and avoidance displacement and transference Or how else do...
Speaking Portuguese in Bijagós
Hot in the schoolhouse we study mathematics, geography. We are told many times that the maps teach history too. We learn of the African Union; we learn of the Empire of Mali, and are told that it was long ago. We learn of Portugal, and of the British in swathes of...
Late Swimmer
In this late-autumn dusk trees discard their leaves like August’s junk lottery tickets. She stands before the pool, long since drained of water, arms raised high, toes curled over the edge of the diving board. What makes her want to swim now? Where was she all summer?...
John Sweet, Featured Author
church on fire says i’m sick of this shit says tell me a story with a happy ending for a change, and so i paint her one of tanguy’s skies instead i paint her one of kahlo’s visions i drive over to the north side to find her father, but no...
Rose Mary Boehm
Enlightenment in the Parking Lot You curl up in the corner of the washroom without concern about the urine on the floor and you hear hot voices and cool riffs leave through the door of the village barn where they celebrate your getting hitched to...
Remember
Remember this. Remember tonight. Remember the rain hitting the window, the train’s whistle cutting through the wind while the night moves southwards. Remember. Remember this. Memorize this. These were the words she uttered, warm and wet, softly and lazily, while a...
undocumented immigrant
a wave good-bye a hug, a kiss parentless a thirsty Hispanic teen travels north on blazing train-car roofs and searing dirt roads away from king-pin violence and cold fear towards warm streets paved of gold caught crossing the border an embarrassed patrol worker...
Hope
My hope is a blue fluffy pillow. A mirror of the sky, there to cushion my falls. It glows; sunlight through a window. My hope is the city. The smell of cigarettes mingling with bus exhaust. Empty sky with stars on the ground in orderly lines. My hope is...
The Ways of Peace
--dedicated to Gandhi and King wage a war of peace a war of peaceful ways a war of peaceful means let violence be validation of violent let murder be mandate of murderers let bloodstains stain bloody, blood soaked hands but let conquerors conquer...
Dark Odyssey
(Inspired by Patrick Leigh Fermor) In dark latitudes beyond the mountains clouds gather fluorescent and frosted in a disturbing array shivering with summer lighting Unknown figures in the wilderness bode ill with spells and charms keep close to spreading spokes of...
Josef Krebs
Conquests illuminate weaknesses Conquests illuminate weaknesses As pastels set off primaries We are all relative to primates and colors Tripping strapped to the desk Eclipsed by ourselves Hidden beneath the surface Unknown unborn Irrational suppositions on...
A Quarter Century of Consequence
Because the window in my heart was left open wide The cold crept in quietly to chastise vein miracles. Because the cold crept in quietly to chastise vein miracles The breath frosted over in wisps of ether demons. Because the breath frosted over in wisps...
The Medal
We were dug in beside the intersection of two roads under the stars when we saw three guys running up to the intersection with packs on their backs. They started planting roadside bombs. We killed two and took the other prisoner. The prisoner screamed all the way into...
La Nación
Tonight, I read like John Coltrane played, unfurl my jazz voice, make scotch-and-soda eyes to the crowd, syncopate my way into the snap-finger backroom, into the dark corner where the slick-haired man with the paint brush mustache, thick-lensed eyeglasses, and loose...
Glory Bound: Children’s Home Thanks Donor for Station Wagon
Photo printed with Funding Appeal, 1965 That behemoth Bel-Air, its tail stopped by a tree, lurches outside the photo frame hiding its eyes, but most of all stilling its mouth – metal teeth in a tight grill tensed to spill the truth. It knows too much of the...
Postcards from the Knife Thrower
June 27 Deadwood, SD God has more surprises. The sun is not hot. Stars are not light. Grass appears to bend, is rigid. I send away grief. I want change. Want it good; the back forth of seesawing guilt, the black-white of yearning. The earth is mud-scarred red...
A Way
put to light what you like you need let out of the deep gnawing in you go all the way down then a little more each time down and you will eventually take Holden and Phoebe Caulfield by the hand bringing them up out of the basement into the great room where the three...
Rain
It rained all day that Saturday. In the evening Dad saw frogs in the garden and wondered where they had come from. Mom said that she had heard tell of frogs that fell from the sky. I said that frogs were the second plague of Egypt and that they invaded the bedrooms of...
Of Desire/Hope
Written in response to the Mali Hostage Crisis Burn. Imagine a hotel room a splitting open inside a dark heat a hymn shining like sparrows in this cavern A dua* being whispered for peace. *Dua is the muslim word for personal prayer/supplication....
Dear Cinderella (or To Whom It May Concern)
I. Little girls starving themselves brittle and family secrets glossed in simper abide by midnight curfews, closing their barbed cage doors behind them. Not women in crimson juice on taffeta, eyes in conflagration. Not you. II. When broken birds...
Healing
The fencer lunges forward the opponent parries but fails and both collide corps-a-corps while the blades flash and clash and leave their signatures in oozing blood that coagulates soon. Steamy tears in droplets combine into streams of hot molten lava and flow on the...
On Receiving a Life-Threatening Diagnosis
Has Death asked me to step out on the floor? For a tango, long and difficult? Will I need attitude, strength to learn new steps? I don’t expect a polka. With luck a waltz, a whirl of warm music in which I’ll get lost rising and sinking in my partner’s arms....
Ashlie Allen
Blood Clot Through pink tinted lamp light, I tilt in the chair, hair sliding off my shoulders until my countenance is black with Japanese heritage Last night, I woke myself up laughing Your eyes, ivory with silver shimmer, fell on me I cradled them until...
Here’s what I remember
A hooker with the 13th chapter of 1st Corinthians tattooed on her side. Four hundred thirty six Crown Royal bags. How much I hate stuffed olives. Not dating Jane Fonda. Ted Bundy’s last meal. Arguing from design using a cockroach. God being ambidextrous. The never...
Ansel Oommen
Fugue I lived ambling through a dream It was nice– the scenery was pleasant And in my naïveté, I lay Anesthetized Sniffing poppies As the clouds scrambled for the east They warned me to follow them I laughed; they were mad Did they...
Grilled Miracles
My daughter looks at the sky as if her real life might fall out of it. Air pressure shifts hope in her bones. She sleeps long in the afternoon, confident of her basic knowledge of gravity. You have no faith, says my son, who claims to see iguanas dance in...
Feral Boy
The feral boy sleeps at the foot of your bed. You only get him one weekend per month but he refuses to sleep in his bed. You don't get to have sex with your younger girlfriend because your feral boy curls at the end of your bed, waiting, like a stray to be taken...
Douglas Cole, Featured Author
Joe Joe lived in a cabin outside of Mount Vernon, Washington, a place his uncle built for hunting. I visited him there once or twice, on my way somewhere else. There was no water, no electricity, just a woodstove and black windows, and his things: a suit of armor...
Marc Tretin
The Dining Room Table is the universal receiver of all letters that will be answered and filed soon and bills to be paid next month and the sprawl of folders on diets and the health effects of prunes. It’s the holder of everyday intentions to make some sort of...
Anthropology of Me
It should be Margaret Meade leaving her barely palatable threesome to figure it all out for me. I don’t live on the banks of the Orinoco: these rocks on the bottom are all paved and worn with ruts. I do want to know why my brown eyes turned green after fifty...
Smoke Break
I never told anyone but I’ll tell you. About the fire Folding up my tongue, The last counted hour With my stomach shrinking Toward my graveyard spine. My body wanted to be pins And needles, Balancing voided meals with Cigarettes. Burn marshmallow Fat...
Steadfast
Wordlessly, she positions him beside her, leaning against the boat’s railing for support. She is now somebody’s wife. She is satisfied with their pose—only slightly more intimate than a prom photograph. Even now, twenty-five years later, I can hear the tension in her...
The Lesson of Pain: Lessen the Pain
“The Marrow of Zen,” one of the sutras of Shunryu Suzuki’s book, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, relates zen practitioners to four horses, with the fourth horse responding only after the pain of the whip penetrates to the marrow of its bones. If alcoholics need to hit rock...
Tick Tock
The ticks I pick from your flesh have the verve of John Donne’s flea but much more adhesive with the fervor of Lyme Disease. The garden’s a death trap, the primrose and forget-me-nots funereal and dungeon-breathed. Spreading composed mulch to conceal the...
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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