John Dorroh

January 2026 | fiction

My Daddy Was an Omnivore

He drank coffee in the wee hours long before the sun oozed its way up over the hardwoods at the end of the property. He played Solitaire and smoked Camels before he woke all of us up to begin our day. My mother had to be at work by 7. Daddy took care of her like a cake maker, frosting her sides with a thick coating of meringuelike candy, opening the door of my bedroom, asking the same question: What would you like for breakfast? I slept like a bear cub, not sure who this man was interrupting my dreams about girls and flying boomerangs with dogs and wispy clouds. What? I’d ask. Denver omelet or pancakes? One day when I came home from playing down at the railroad tracks with my buddies, I found him crouching in the garden pulling up greenery and placing it in a Tupperware bowl. Dandelions, wild onions, unidentified grass and weeds What are you doing that for? I asked. This is dinner tonight. It’ll be great with those pork chops you like. As it turned out, the salad greens from the backyard weren’t so good for most of the family. My sister refused to touch them, and my mother gagged. Since he always seemed to like me, I decided to humor him and have a taste. Explosion on my tongue, in the back of my throat. Fireworks! No meat required. Transformation like spine Unfriending notochord, transmitting blasts of bovine deliciousness into the atmosphere. I am wild and grazer and hologram of urban sunsets, their lemon essence and citrus aftertaste diffusing into my soul. My mother demanded spaghetti and handmade meatballs. My sister didn’t care because she was in love with a man from the plastic factory. And Trixie, the terrier, ate everything she was offered. I pushed my pork chop aside that evening, but my father urged Don’t give it up…yet. You need both hands to make your dreams come true.

John Dorroh

John Dorroh likes to travel. He often ends up in other people’s kitchens, sharing culinary tidbits and tall tales. “Learning about cultures begins with the food,” he asserts. Six of his poems were nominated for Best of the Net. Hundreds of others appeared in journals such as Feral, River Heron, Burningword, Kissing Dynamite, North Dakota Quarterly, Penstricken, and North of Oxford. He’s had a book of micro fiction and two chapbooks of poetry published in recent years. Once he was awarded Editor’s Choice Award for a regional journal and received enough money for a sushi dinner for two.

Priscilla Long

January 2026 | fiction

One Day in the Life of Donna DeSimone

Donna, you will never become less deaf, her audiologist informs. Keep learning, she encourages herself. In ASL she has reached the letter L. Keep living. She buses down to Pike Place Market to purchase potatoes and greens, maybe collard. Downtown, she deboards into the midst of an ICE raid. Masked goons are throwing a well-dressed, screaming woman to the asphalt. People are holding up phone cameras, yelling Fuck you! Get out! A tall man is photographing. She knows that old camera. Husband of her youth. Why had she left him? Henry! He looks up. Donna! she sees his mouth say.

Priscilla Long

Priscilla Long is author of nine books including Cartographies of Home: Poems (MoonPath Press, 2026) and On Spaces and Colors (University of New Mexico Press, 2026). Her work has appeared in publications such as The Hudson Review, The Southern Review, and The American Scholar. Her awards include a National Magazine Award and ten of her essays have been honored as “notable” in various years of Best American Essays. She has an MFA from the University of Washington and grew up on a dairy farm on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. To learn more, go to www.priscillalong.com.

Jim Ross

January 2026 | visual art

Rained Upon Rose 4 - Jim Ross

Rained Upon Rose 4

Jim Ross

Jim Ross jumped into creative pursuits in 2015 after a rewarding career in public health research. With a graduate degree from Howard University, he has, in ten years, published nonfiction, fiction, poetry, photography, hybrid works, interviews, and plays in 200+ journals on five continents. Photo publications include Barnstorm, Blue Mesa, Burningword, Invisible City, Orion, Phoebe, and Stonecoast. Photo-essays include Burningword, Kestrel, Litro, NWW, Sweet, and Typehouse. His most recent interview, published by Terrain.org, was conducted with an artist. A Best of the Net nominee in Nonfiction and Art, he also wrote/acted in a one-act play and appeared in a documentary limited series broadcast internationally. Jim’s family splits time between the city and the mountains.

Carlos Cunha

January 2026 | nonfiction

Monochrome Lane

The strip mall may well be on its last legs, but it still litters the landscape of many American towns and suburbs, especially here in Florida – an aggressively charmless, deservedly unloved suburban phenomenon that usually consists of nothing more than a basic parking lot with, at one end, a drably functional strip of windowed boxes that are usually rented out to low-end retail businesses, some local, some nation or regional chains, their motley commercial signage usually obeying no single design standard.

Running an errand on my bike one afternoon, I came to the example of this phenomenon nearest to where I live, a fairly large one, and, to avoid the unpredictable driving of cars using the busier sections of its expansive and otherwise mostly empty parking lot, I chose to cut through the service lane that runs between the back of the stores and some woods and wetlands where, as a bonus, I thought I might spot some interesting water fowl, although what ended up catching my eye instead was the back of the strip mall itself, and how extreme an aggravation you might say it was of the drabness in front. If the front looked drab, the back was drabness itself, because all of it was painted one color, a light, muddy yellow-brown. The effect was eerie, and ended up seeming even artful. It was as though a revealing statement were being made about the deceptive nature of the front, about how, behind commerce’s meretricious variety, lies a drably monochromatic, rather industrial sameness. And it was a statement that, sadly, could have extended to the lives of those suburban residents, including me, whom this strip mall was intended to serve. Not only were the backs of the different stores not distinguished by differing hues, the features on those buildings were not, so that I had to concentrate to notice, then to identify, the things camouflaged by that monochrome mudslide of yellow. The building backs were deprived not only of difference but, practically, of a third dimension, the clayey quality of the paint being such that it seemed to elude shadows, flattening doorknobs, locks, door jambs, vents, grills, lamp standards, lamp shades, awnings, AC plants, large industrial alarm bells, sundry wires, cables, pipes, casings. It called to mind the desert topography of long-dead worlds where all features are merely vestigial.

So it came almost as a shock when one of those vestigial doors swung open and someone — a living person, a woman, a worker — appeared, backing out uncertainly. It turned out that she was pulling a shopping cart after her, and her hesitancy had to do with the fact that the cart was piled high with precariously perched empty brown boxes, the sameness of their color echoing the sameness of the color of the back of the strip mall, as if delivering the same dismaying message.

 

Carlos Cunha

Carlos Cunha is a journalist. His literary writing was noted in the Best American Essays 2019 anthology edited by Rebecca Solnit, and he has been published in the Kenyon Review, TriQuarterly, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and a Seattle Review edition edited by David Shields. Born in Portugal, he grew up in South Africa and lives in Gainesville, Florida.

Dotty LeMieux

January 2026 | poetry

When the Neighbors Sell their Knock-Down in Just Four Years for Twice What They Paid for it

They spiff it up,

repair old siding,

cut into the crumbling hillside

to squeeze in a bonus room.

 

Throw on a coat of paint, shiny

like a chrome-plated lie.

Bucolic gem among the pines—

reads the realtor’s sales pitch.

 

So much potential. The realtor gaunt

in high heels, a plucked chicken

in a power suit. Signs go up.

Buyers come & bid & fight

 

each other over the price,

wrestling like amateur grapplers

in the mud of a dive bar. Short

escrow & the sellers decamp

 

to North Carolina to try

its Southern charm, this

also a lie. Now our eyes

shine with possibility. We too

 

could gentrify, cash out

on our constant fixer, our old house

groomed for the highest bidder

eager for a quick flip

 

as young techies move

their crypto AI brains into the void

and demo what we worked

so hard to preserve. And then

 

we move where old people

who never planned ahead go—

elder mobile home community

in a nearby town or a college town

 

up north where it rains & students

study science & the classics,

and we can still pretend our lives

contain a wealth of options.

 

Dotty LeMieux

Dotty has published five poetry chapbooks, including “Henceforth I Ask Not Good Fortune” from Finishing Line Press in 2021 and “Viruses, Guns and War” from Main Street Rag Press in 2023. She formerly edited the literary and art journal, The Turkey Buzzard Review. Her work has appeared in publications such as Rise Up Review, Loch Raven Review, Painted Bride, MacQueen’s Quarterly, Gyroscope, and Wild Roof. She lives in Northern California with her husband and two active dogs, where she practices environmental law and manages progressive political campaigns.