In This Issue

Luck with an F

When my children ask me who won the world, fear grabs all 78 places American women used to think of as autonomous. Here in Spain, the news corners me from 5000 miles away, its claws sharp but intangible— a lucky escape, friends say. Luck, that four-letter...

Minseo Jung

Minseo Jung is a junior at Seoul Scholars International Art and Design, and her work primarily focuses on identity and the exploration of self. She understands herself by expressing her personal experiences and emotions through art. Using creative ideas and...

Night Drive

Steam rises in swirls, wisps, moves like a candle snuffed out, then smoke curling. This road on a Wednesday night in the middle of Italy is dark except for the headlights that cut through the fog, barely, and the city of Macerata in the distance. I know this land. I...

The Darkness White

Alexi’s father was the family's artistic soul, and his legacy influences Alexi's appreciation for abstract art. Throughout his life, art and drawing provided Alexi with solace and joy, yet he never felt the need to share his work. After his father's passing in...

Kristin Lueke

i ask the sun too much each plant i’ve kept alive so far i call my friend. each of my friends has its own quiet prayer, it’s called how i’d like to be cared for— for instance, from a distance, please & gently, within reach, without expectation but...

The Light Was Never Ours

On the bank of the Seine in the heath and heart of the sun’s playground— that's where we lay. Our heads rest on a cushion of plight as we sink further into the fields of lush river violets, violets smooching our petaled cheeks— blanketing our freckles from the...

Julien Griswold

I invent a time machine to go back and witness the moment before my birth certificate signing, my parents’ silent prayer before clicking the pen To Julie, once, Julie, now, Julien, forever, my heart. What if your name was Antoine or Rebecca or Augustine or Vicky or...

On Death

I was born almost dead, the cord wrapped around my throat. A doctor(ate) actually said the words to me: “You carry Death close.” Death has stood by my side, time and again, and said, “It’s not her time yet.” I’ve accepted it. Damaged lungs from 9/11. Volunteering in...

Espadrilles

In the Guadalajara market, I bought a pair of straw espadrilles. When they fell apart months later, I realized the soles were made out of car tires. I fed the tops to a goat at the side of a dusty road. Years later in Friuli near Venice, I bought a pair of velvet...

Nesting

There is something very large building a nest in the parkway by the house I grew up in. The house where my father still lives. He takes walks in this parkway. It makes me nervous. I guess I first noticed it after my mother died. It looked like a large pile of brush in...

Comedown in a Club Bathroom

The boy’s feet are bound to the floor, body held before a mirror. Cold lake, the glass spinning his near-naked body into fable, or cautionary tale. How, how it sings back. Diamond-toothed doppelgänger. The chambered hallways of his heart bisected, something like a...

Chronoscope 262: March like thaw water

Sun again: that geode cold light that briefly splits the granite sky: storms there: storms there: darker because of this temporary brightness. The first shadows in a week like inkfade ancient tattoos impermanent crease crosshatched on the last of...

Sastry Karra

Jaganadha “Sastry” Karra, originally from India, moved at 24. He has worked in IT for 27 years and has lived in Delaware since 2024. In his spare time, he enjoys outdoor photography, particularly of waterfalls. He explores nearby state parks with his...

Airport Prayer

If I count the times I cried today, I would need more than two hands— an 81 year old passes through security and tells me her mother just stopped driving yesterday at the age of 108; a woman at the counter hands me my coffee and says Here, baby; and when we are lining...

Taegyoung Shon

Taegyoung Shon is a Junior attending BC Collegiate in Korea. She won several awards at elementary school science imagination competitions. She makes various pottery works inspired by looking at the Internet or Pinterest in her school. She also enjoys going to...

Dinner parties

She lived to host dinner parties. It was a need, a compulsion, to fulfill it she would look for the most absurd reasons. Like the time she bought a purse and messaged our group: Guess what it’s dinner party time. I just bought a purse. Or when she had a fight with her...

Interview

It’s a pleasure to meet you…just water is fine… Thanks for taking the trouble to give me a chance. So, you’ve made it at last to the back of the line and the candidate worth just a cursory glance? Inconspicuous as the invisible man, I’ve a resume anyone sane...

Jean Wolff

Jean Wolff has had group and solo exhibits in various galleries in New York City and internationally. In addition, she has published 153 works in 104 issues of 61 magazines. She was born in Detroit, Michigan, and studied fine arts at the Center for Creative...

Unbidden Image

I can’t unsee firefighters hanging around our living room like uninvited guests at a party waiting with my wife in case her heart attack arrives before the ambulance does, each man scanning the room inch by inch as if flames might burst from a bookcase,...

Local Boys

In brown and grey demob suits, stoked up well with Woodbines, the three of them, from the same regiment, were thrown up cheek-by-hip on the platform: Tim, Spence, the younger David. They were packed into a wooden-slat-seat train and Spence, a chunky pugilist of a man,...

How to Touch the Dead

I’ve rehearsed this in my mind countless times– Put the broom or cardboard scrap on far side of carcass Place scoop– something thin and stiff yet flexible, at near edge Draw broom towards scoop– towards myself This is where the problem lies– no matter what tool...

José Being Himself

When I entered the parking, there was a problem. A BMW SUV with a Connecticut license plate was parked right in the middle, blocking access to the specialty food store. I was angry. Why the fuck couldn’t that dumb bastard park in one of the nearby spaces, instead of...

needle blight

it is human nature to want to build something substantial and wonder why our bridges fall like fever. upon conversion from spruce to roof, the eastern hemlock remains square-shouldered unhungry for sun. a hospital falls in the forest and everyone can...

Spencer Jones Ate the Last Dodo

CNN: American reality show contestant kills, eats protected bird in New Zealand Clad in their best, their most expensive, Lululemon, Nike, P.E. Nation, Versace, or Adidas, flexing their abs on national TV, traipsing all over and screwing up the last protected wild...

Yeobin Park

Yeobin Park is a junior at BC Collegiate. She is the founder of Point of View Productions, her school’s first film club. She has had her films nominated and screened in numerous film festivals, including the All-American High School Film Festival. She plans to...

Lost Places

There were orchards here once and creeks that ran all the way to July. In those days, we could cross one on foot and up the embankment on the other side, just below the walnut grove, long gone, as well as deer who lay in the tall grass and flew at our scent....

Stephen Curtis Wilson

Wilson is a designer and photographer. Central Illinois has been his frame of reference for a lifetime. His well-seen perspective provides him with an intimate, unique notion of the artfulness of this region, quintessentially Midwestern. He was a medical and...

C.S.I.

(an early Halloween) Mildred has a gash on her forehead where the hatchet from her boyfriend split the bone. Nearby, there is a skeleton hanging by its left foot from a small maple-oak across the way. The rail fence is shattered where the van with thirty-two...

Linda K. Allison

After forty years in finance, Linda K. Allison is having the time of her life writing, photographing, and exploring this amazing world. Her writing has appeared in The Milk House, Moon Park Review, and The Bluebird Word, among others. Her photography has...

Hyungjun Chin

Hyungjun Chin is a Sophomore at Cornerstone Collegiate Academy in Seoul, Korea. He is very interested in describing historical events through graphic design or 2D drawings. He has tried various ways to express his feelings about historical events through...

Suspended in air

At home, we are preparing to paint the living room walls pale yellow. Its summer. The heat is oppressive. There are cobwebs in every corner of the walls. The spiders have weaved their webby homes in our spacious one. They are in clusters, like spools of grey cotton...

Ron Riekki

Hyungjun Chin

Ron Riekki

I get asked to be on a podcast and he’s never read any of my poems, ever, doesn’t even know my name, asks me, “So, what’s your name?” as if this is a thoughtful question, and I wonder how much research he’d have had to do to find out my name, especially when we’ve already exchanged multiple emails, and he says, “So, what are you? A poet? A fiction writer?” And I realize he’s going to ask me my height next and weight after that and maybe we’ll get into sports and weather in a bit, and I realize how much I ache to have a person who just simply sees me, how I was just on an elevator yesterday with two people, one on my left and one on my right, and how they talked through me, as if I am a ghost, and I get ready for the podcast host to ask me if I’m a phantom and I get myself ready to say, “I don’t know. I might be. I feel like I’m fading.” And I remember seeing an interview with Norm Macdonald when it was nearing the end of his life and no one knew it was nearing the end of his life, except him and a few other very select people, and it feels like that for me, like I’m near the end, and when I write, sometimes I think, “Is this my last poem?” And I remember talking to Donald...

Issue 113, Jan 2025

Featuring: Issue 113, published January 2025, features works of poetry, flash fiction, short nonfiction, and visual art by Linda K. Allison, Swetha Amit, Richard Atwood, Rose Mary Boehm, Daniel Brennan, Maia Brown-Jackson, Hyungjun Chin, Amanda Nicole Corbin, Kaviya Dhir, Jerome Gagnon, Jacqueline Goyette, Julien Griswold, Alexi Grojean, Ken Hines, Minseo Jung, Sastry Karra, Joy Kreves, E.P. Lande, Kristin Lueke, Robert Nisbet, Yeobin Park, Dian Parker, Roopa Menon, Ron Riekki, Esther Sadoff, Chris Scriven, Taegyoung Shon, Mary Thorson, John Walser, Julie Weiss, Stephen Curtis Wilson, and Jean Wolff.

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