January 2026 | poetry
A Kat, a Mouse, a Brick
Be not harsh with ‘Krazy.’ He is but a shadow
of himself caught in the web of this mortal skein.
—George Herriman (1880-1944)
Charlie Chaplin, Jack Kerouac, R. Crumb, Quentin Tarantino.
Krazy Kat has some loyal fans.
Cartoonist George Herriman reprised the same plot
with shifting scenes of a dream-like Arizona landscape.
Characters: an androgynous & incurably romantic black Kat
in thrall to Ignatz, an outsized, stick-legged, pale-pink mouse
who routinely clobbers Kat with a brick. POW!
Kat mistakes each attack as proof of love.
Meanwhile, Offissa Pupp, who has fallen for the tormented
Kat, tries to protect him—or is it her?
A comic love triangle. Unrequited & surreal.
The strip’s biggest fan, William Randolph Hearst,
featured Krazy Kat in his newspapers for thirty years.
Surprise ending: Three decades after Herriman’s death
it’s revealed that the gifted cartoonist—
who’d come to LA from New Orleans— was not ‘Greek’
as he claimed, but mixed-race Creole.
Herriman painstakingly kept his secret, wearing a hat—
day or night— to conceal his ‘knotty’ hair.
Friends remembered a shy, self-effacing man
who lived with wife & daughters in the Hollywood Hills.
Krazy Kat, a brilliant, prescient fable on race?
The cartoonist claimed he ‘just drew what he saw.’
In a 1921 cartoon, a bucket of whitewash falls on Kat.
Only briefly—does the mouse return his love. Then POW!
Joan E. Bauer
Joan E. Bauer is the author of three full-length poetry collections, Fig Season (Turning Point, 2023), The Camera Artist (Turning Point, 2021), and The Almost Sound of Drowning (Main Street Rag, 2008). Recent work has appeared in Paterson Literary Review, Slipstream, Chiron Review, and Vox Populi: A Curated Webspace for Poetry, Politics, and Nature. Three of her poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. For some years, she was a teacher and counselor. She now divides her time between Venice, CA, and Pittsburgh, PA, where she co-curates Hemingway’s Summer Poetry Series with Kristofer Collins.
January 2026 | nonfiction
So You’ve Decided to Convert Your Middle-Aged Bedroom into a Magical Forest But All You Have is Amazon and Weed
Take the edible and ask yourself which discount rug seems most like grass. Whisper the now popular refrain “touch grass.” Then make sure that it won’t feel like grass, but draw the line at watching an “unboxing” video. Select accompanying “portal” curtains, wall-size mushroom tapestries, and a comforter that looks like glistening moss under the cool blue moonlight. Change the quantity on the grass vibe rug. You will need 3. You should be ensconced. One rug cannot provide more than a sample patch. Will your feet sink into it? That’s necessary. Of course, if they sink in too far the vacuum will devour it and burn out its belt. That’s what happened when it ate a catnip mouse. Check for a depth measurement.
Will the portal look silly if the curtains’ width is too wide? Select a narrower width so as not to crumple the magical image printed on them when they are hung up. Confront a different problem. Will the curtains provide blackout calm if they only just kiss in the center? It’s possible that the forced air heat could pop them open at vulnerable moments of nudity. Decide to sacrifice the integrity of the portal image and change back to a wider width.
Assess your cart total. Save most items for later.
Become distracted by the photographic tiger wall decal. Would a tiger enter a magical forest, and if not, why not? Add to cart. You’ll have a tiger. You deserve that much.
Close the app. Take a moment to ask yourself if this transformation can save you from the shit life you built. After all, you’ll mostly be asleep in here. Odds of teleporting to a believably magic land are low. You’ll still do things like buy groceries, pay bills online, and go to work nearly everyday of your entire life. You’ll still be annoyed by traffic and by every stripe of human incompetence within your purview.
Open the app.
Rethink this whole thing and convert the plan to Granny’s gentle country cottage. You’ll need crochet everything. Is now the right time to consider a shelf? It is. You’ll require a series of porcelain dolls and those will each need a doll stand. Should their hair color be consistent? What if you select all redheads? That seems cozy. Type in “porcelain dolls with red hair.” Observe the prices and consider your investment pieces. Type “cross stitch tissue box holder.”
Close the app. Re-open.
Re-think in ocean submersion. Add watery curtains galloping with dolphins. Change to orca pattern. Consider a light projector that mimics waves. Type “ocean decal.” The shark is too aggressive. Scroll for manatee.
Shut the app. Okay, okay. Re-open. Let’s get this right.
Rethink in vintage bordello. A velvet comforter and rhinestone chandeliers. You’ll need new knobs on your accordian-style closet door, something opulent.
Stop. Buy nothing. Close the fucking app. My god.
Sarah Sorensen
Sarah Sorensen (she/her), MA, MLIS is a queer writer based in the Metro Detroit area. She has been published over 80 times in literary magazines, but her most recent work appears in Another Chicago Magazine and Garland. She’s honored to be a Best Small Fictions 2025 and runner-up in the 2025 Rock Paper Poem Poetry Contest. Sarah is currently completing her first novel, despite an array of distractions from her fiery dog daughter and unstoppable cat son. Until then, you can find her forthcoming work in The Broadkill Review and Prime Number Magazine!
January 2026 | poetry
Objects From The Pyramid Collection: A Catalog of Personal Growth And Exploration
Mystic body dust
things that come to us
Oils of ecstasy
fuel for allergies
Karma Sutra candles
life that’s hard to handle
Pleasure enhancers
nude dancers
The secret garden trilogy
one and one and one make three
Love Celtic-style
wet wanton wild
Crone stone
the negative endless drone
Royal nightwear
dreams that blare
The temple horn
purveyors of porn
Ruby in the rough
you’re so damn tough
Spirit of the faeries
legs that are hairy
The mysteries of Isis
another friggen crisis
Guardian of Hopes and Dreams
you make me want to scream
The Woman Who Wanted It All
had a fall and stalled on crawl
Billie Jean Stratton
Billie Jean Stratton is a 74-year-old New York farm girl who never liked the barn and spent much of her youth sidestepping hired hands by playing the flute in an acoustically superior bathroom. She met Joseph Brodsky when he first came to America. Billie’s been published in 2002’s Comstock Review, 2005’s Sulfur River, and 2014’s Lost Orchard – Prose and Poetry from the Kirkland College Community. Billie’s poem “Brodsky” was published by Ibbetson St. Press and was nominated for a 2024 Pushcart Prize.
January 2026 | nonfiction
Identity
You have a love-hate relationship with eagles.
It’s the national animal for your home nest, also the national emblem for your chosen nest.
In the end, it’s all just a bunch of letters and feathers. If you’re lucky, some numbers, too, but let’s be honest, your A# doesn’t define what your mom used to feed you for breakfast, or the classical literature you read in your first language and later in your second language and then – yes, because you’re committed to excellence – your third language. Neither do the W— forms your spouse had to fill out to sponsor you into this country that said you should, could never be a burden and you should never break a law and you would not be allowed to sit on a jury or vote, unless – unless! – you paid X amount of $ and filled out a gazillion forms and studied for a test about something called civics –
but when you do, you question the test questions and especially what the answers have to do with what is now happening within these borders and whether along the line when you did the dishes and paid the taxes and taught your children proper English and told them not to break any laws you somehow misunderstood something about eagles all along.
Their calls, it turns out, are puny.
Shrill, really – look at me but then look away while I do something not worthy.
They may glide majestically and drop a kingly feather here or there, but they often feast on what others have gleaned and achieved and scavenge when no one is watching.
You get a crick in your neck squinting up at them and then you stumble because you forgot where your feet really belong.
To label something as royal or emblematic because it looks and hoots like an eagle – naw, you lose faith in that, and also in those random numbers and letters printed on documents that were supposed to hold your destiny in inky hands, but then really just lied about who you are and what keeps you safe in this place in which you had hoped to land.
Alina Zollfrank
Alina Zollfrank dreams trilingually in the Pacific Northwest. She believes artists and writers are humanity’s true pulse, social media might just kill our essence, and produce should be shared with neighbors. Her work has been nominated twice for the Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize, and recently appeared in SAND, Door Is A Jar, Tint, and Cholla Needles, with more forthcoming in The MacGuffin, Salt Hill, Reckon Review, and Heavy Feather Review. Alina is a grateful recipient of the 2024 Washington Artist Trust Grant and committed disability advocate.
January 2026 | nonfiction
Not Another Tragic Fattie
Your new sixth-grade class already had its own rhythms, inside jokes, and hierarchy. Like, it was already over halfway through the school year.
And there was this fat girl—like really fat. Like, nearly 200lbs-fat.
She was such a nerd. Like, during oral book reports in front of the class, hers had weird titles like Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, Openers of Old Oregon Volume No. 1.
She was super into Jesus. Like, she quoted Bible verses and invited people to her church for some sort of club on Wednesday nights with a weird name: AWANA. Kinda like marijuana except it had nothing to do with weed because that would have been cool.
She seemed sorta poor. Like, she didn’t wear Esprit sweatshirts and Guess jeans like the other girls. Her shirts had uneven stitches on material that was too thick or the wrong color. And she had pants that looked like they were trying to be jeans except there were no belt loops or fly but buttoned up on the side.
The fat kid is always picked on, right? Like, in every movie or TV show or after school special where there’s a fat kid. I mean, have you ever heard of a fat kid who wasn’t bullied?
Except nobody said anything when you said whatever it was you said to make fun of me—maybe that I had a fat butt? Like, they didn’t say much of anything at all to you after that. I felt a certain schadenfreude seeing you sitting alone on a swing at recess, even as I understood you had said what you said in an effort to belong. I did not know then how to reconcile my feelings of vindication and relief with Christian charity (which I work hard to practice though I’m not as Evangelical these days).
Even though I went to a different elementary school every year (because yeah, I was sorta poor), I had little experience with other kids teasing me about my weight. Like, I have only one other memory before you: in second grade two boys shouted something at recess about me being fat—though I cannot remember what. My girlfriends yelled something back at them, and we went back to playing whatever it was we were playing.
Rates of bullying against fat kids vary wildly. Like, anywhere between 19% to 60% depending on how it is measured (I’m totally still a nerd). Those numbers mean that there are a whole lot of fat kids who don’t get bullied.
The fat kid is not a guaranteed victim. Like, being fat (current weight: 268lbs) need not be a tragic trope.
Michelle Strausbaugh
Michelle Strausbaugh is a chronic illness management specialist working from a bed in Portland, Oregon. Her work has appeared in Hippocampus Magazine (and she’s still buzzed that it was nominated for a Pushcart).
