January 2025 | poetry
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 Beatrice or Walter? Or Ishmael or Clark or Bianca or Dixie or Shauna or Joey or Thaddeus or Milton? Or world-eater, snail-chaser, big walrus, weak handshake, smoke break, sweet manger, good morrow, high heaven, smug winker, long freight car, old matchbox, big sister, door greeter, worm hooker, over-easy, glossy nightville, snooze daily, toast burning, smell-licker, wet shellac, deer herder, my snowman, hot reminder, the shake-up, boy howdy, listen closest, beggar breadbasket, pigeon spikes, gloveless finger, ugly watch guard, open present, pushing wedlock, a gardenia, child’s shadow, castle drawstring, axe in-motion, mother’s comfort, one toe showing, fish-in-ziplock, dear old fellow, the grand lady, hemline feather, long-lost tabby, “Dad, I love you,” the day after mourning, the night before morning, small star one, dancing creased shoes, how to hold you, someone’s baby, street dog drinking.
Julien Griswold
Julien Griswold (they/them) thinks insurance agencies should cover notebook costs as therapy expenses. When they aren’t laying their thoughts bare in said notebooks, they study at Brown University. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Palette Poetry, Pinhole Poetry, The /temz/ Review, Poetry Online, and elsewhere. Connect with them online @cheerupjulien.
January 2025 | poetry
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 frigid
blistering air, softening
our cracked lips. We smear
violet husks across our faces
until they crumple, shriveling
from an absence of light
in these mallows of mid September
gloom, their ominous purple filling
the smiles across our faces before
their sweet sugar plum scent could
even frolick into our pores. We are
lifeless—but we weren’t always. For years
we smelled of the sun’s honeyed lemons
and orange meringue pie, raindrops
and gifts of gold. Our eyes shimmered
in the leathery moon’s shadows—
a crisp December glistening on the horizon.
At the peak of our ecstacy, we giggled
until cancer’s rind of tree bark
wrapped its treacherous ridges around
our lungs, punted splinters down our throats
to quench our laughter. Somehow
the wavering constellations illuminate
the ball point grasses’ narrow, finite hallways
before they retract into the night sky’s
lustrous black hole, the one trapping
each dusty auburn wish in an endless tunnel—
for more years of violet picking.
for more lemon scented sundays spent
basking in the sun’s generous warmth.
for more time—because the light was never ours.
Kaviya Dhir
Kaviya Dhir is a student poet based in Texas. As a junior in high school, she has been recognized by Georgetown University and the National Scholastic Art & Writing Awards for her work. She was recently named a finalist for the 2024-2025 Houston Youth Poet Laureate designation.
January 2025 | nonfiction
- 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 Iraqi Kurdistan, mere hours from Mosul. The multitude of checkpoints along the Syrian border with masked men with guns far too large, held far too lazily in one-handed grips, leaning against their shoulders, as they confiscated my passport and tried to pull me to the small, windowless building that was somehow present at every one.
- A village decimated by ISIS, and in a small city where I was the lone American naively going on early morning runs and exploring the destroyed buildings, painting over the swastikas I found with paint “borrowed” from nearby construction sites, and still Death said: “Not yet.”
- The village elders of Duhola asked me to help spread the word of their people, of the Yazidi forgotten entirely by the international community. I promised I would. I still try. But I am just one, small person.
- So, Death, what is it exactly about me that you think I have yet to do? Is there a chance, however small, that you think I might make some sort of difference in this world? What is it that’s going to happen before you gently greet me, take my hand, and tell me I can rest?
Maia Brown-Jackson
After the incredibly practical literature degree from the University of Chicago, pushcart-nominated Maia Brown-Jackson braved the myriad esoteric jobs that follow, until straying to Iraq to volunteer with survivors of ISIS genocide. Inspired with new focus, she caffeinated herself through a graduate degree in terrorism and human rights and now investigates fraud, waste, and abuse of humanitarian aid in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. Also, she writes.
January 2025 | nonfiction
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 espadrilles at the base of the Rialto Bridge. That pair lasted two months longer than the first. I recycled those at our local dump. The boys, both times, didn’t last much longer.
I live in Vermont, surrounded by giant sugar maples and white birch. I kayak nearby with a Blue Heron family and five turtles. My peonies are blooming. It’s cold today when three days earlier it was high in the nineties. I’m wearing a sweater, which I also bought overseas.
My mother always wore espadrilles all summer long. I have her last pair, long past wearing but certainly better made than the two pairs I bought overseas. Just because you’re in a sexy foreign country doesn’t mean the merchandise is sexy even if the guy selling it is. Once, in San Francisco, my sexy boyfriend bought me a gardenia to wear behind my ear. I wore it everyday until it turned brown. When I got home, on my doorstep was a large oval vase with six gardenias floating on top. That boy I lost my virginity to in high school and we’re still friends, unlike the two espadrille boyfriends.
Besides peonies, I also swoon over orange blossoms. I’ve a tall branch of mock orange that comes a close second to the orange blossom grove I rode through on horseback, also overseas, with another boyfriend. It was summer then, in a desert, which enhanced the scent to swooning even more (if you were riding the other horse you would know what I mean). I keep searching for an orange blossom perfume that smells like that evening but they’re all imitations smelling acrid and cheap. The boyfriend was never cheap. He bought me a first edition of my favorite author, Jean Giono, with a woodblock print on the cover of a man shooting a boar with red fire flaring out the muzzle of his long rifle. In the background, a burning hill is ablaze in orange flames with little figures running around, their arms in the air, mouths wide, screaming. But the book doesn’t feel like that to me, more like velvet and peonies.
There’s no way around the past unless you think you’ve owned it which is like saying you have a contract signed with blood and drawn up by the State. My past with these guys is most certainly drawn with blood, thinned out crimson in the regions of my brain. I enjoyed each and every one even if they didn’t work out in the end. There’s no end to blood, or men, or memories, or the past. An ever flowing, changing bloodstream. Impossible to tourniquet, no matter how many sutures.
Dian Parker
Dian Parker’s essays have been published in New Critique, Yolk, Amsterdam Review, 3:AM Magazine, The Rupture, Anomaly, Epiphany, Tiny Molecules, Event, among others, and nominated for a number of Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net. She also writes about art for the Observer, ArtNet, and other art publications. www.dianparker.com
January 2025 | fiction
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 the clearing. Maybe from a storm or from the efforts to rid the area of an invasive species like buckthorn or thistles or the contents of my mother’s hospice supplies. But it was in a perfect circle.
The circle, the size of a small house, was furrowed in the middle, like something was lying there at night, and I wondered what could be so big. I thought of a bird the size of a hatchback car, and when I thought of the car, it was the car my father drove when I was four. A black Volkswagen Rabbit. I remember driving behind him in my mother’s car, in the passenger seat, and seeing the muffler drag on the pavement, making small orange sparks. My mother saying he would explode, and sometimes he did.
New things started to appear in the tree limbs of the nest. I saw my father’s pocket knives that fell between the couch cushions over time. Once, I saw a chair, and I had seen that chair before. It was in my parents’ living room when I was small. My father once threw its matching ottoman across the room. There were ash marks from my parents’ cigarettes on the seat of it, and a perfect circle burn. I would bring my father pepsis while he smoked and read to me. Scary stories or even just my name written on an envelope, so I would know it.
Once, during a fight, my father slammed an unopened pepsi can against the counter so hard it burst. My mother, in silence, cleaned it, while my father apologized, circling her. Now, the chair looked just the same, still stained with ash, and it was covered in leaves and empty pepsi cans and little, yellowed, sharp crescents, my mother’s fingernails that she tore off with her teeth.
My mother’s clothes weaved their way throughout the nest. My father has been asking me for years to look through her closet–her drawers for anything I might want. But there is nothing I want. I’m afraid to open the door. I’m afraid of what could be hiding in there, now. It would be dark. She wore black because she believed in black, but there were embellishments. Gold buttons. Large plastic jewels glued to the sweaters in purple and gold and silver. What is the bird that collects shiny things? What color is it? I’m very nervous.
The nest is getting bigger. My father has been doing work–making it more and more like home. The oriental rug that is soaked through with dog pee and baking soda lines the bottom. There are eggs, now, a bluish-green with spots of brown. I know that color. My father’s eyes are that color. He is stopping to rest more and more on his walks. And I want to tell him no. Do not stop here.
I can see something else in there. Something is moving. It’s crawling. It looks like it’s made out of the trimmings from my father’s beard he collected with his white electric razor. They would spill all over the sink in my parents’ bathroom and my mother would peck at him about it. The shedding. Brown at first, but as the thing moves, it goes gray, then white, then patchy and I can see the skin. It is not smooth. It is papery and thin and folds over itself like an envelope. I imagine it would be soft, but I won’t touch it because you are not supposed to touch the babies, or their mother will not come back. Your smell will get on them and she will know it. And this is what makes me nervous. I do not want their mother to know my smell. Though, I suspect, she does already.
Mary Thorson
Mary Thorson lives and writes in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She received her BA in Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and her MFA from Pacific University in Oregon. Her stories have appeared in the Los Angeles Review, Reckon Review, Cotton Xenomorph, Milwaukee Noir, Worcester Review, Rock and a Hard Place, Tough, among others. Her short story, “Book of Ruth,” was included in Best American Mystery & Suspense, ’24, edited by Steph Cha and S.A. Cosby. Her work has been nominated for Best American Short Stories, A Derringer, and a Pushcart Prize. She hangs out with her two feisty daughters, the best husband, and a dog named Pam when she isn’t teaching high school English, reading, or writing ghost stories. Lori Galvin represents her at Aevitas Creative Management. Thorson is currently working on a novel.
