Tetman Callis

April 2025 | visual art

Driving at Night – New Mexico, 1989

 

Tetman Callis is a writer and artist based in Chicago. His stories have appeared in various literary magazines, most recently BULL, Tahoma Literary Review, Elm Leaves Journal, Anti-Heroin Chic, Running Wild Press: Short Story Anthology Vol. 7, and Propagule. He is the author of the memoir High Street: Lawyers, Guns & Money in a Stoner’s New Mexico (Outpost 19, 2012) and the children’s book Franny & Toby (Silky Oak Press, 2015). His work has also been featured in Burningword.

no longer personal

April 2025 | poetry

Then I did my impression of a drag queen

impersonating Ed Sullivan singing T. Rex.

Unsurprisingly, it didn’t go over.

What a lousy Thanksgiving.

Everyone wanted to ‘do yoga.’

But asking Middle-Class white people

to take up space seems redundant.

Did I make it into the middle class? Nope.

I had to borrow money from them to declare bankruptcy.

If they approach you, keep everything but your tears.

We put on Ella Fitzgerald and the trees go wild.

Here even grass attacks (slowly).

I confess to worshipping the nightingale, among others.

At times all culture seems a pantomime fronting a great evil.

Physicists say that time in this universe is red.

Their cigars smell of dust.

The mystery of the kitchen is like the dream of an angel.

Some of these spices induce inactivity.

Some speak directly to the poisoned soul.

We catch a glimpse of the reality we are about to enter.

Everything looks like a cartoon but it’s the right place.

They say it’s easier if you have a teaspoon.

They say the machine restores itself.

Walk with me toward new prayer opportunities.

We are too high to find your coat.

It takes time to get comfortable with your minimum.

You’re doing great shrub by shrub.

It’s called ‘the partridge of meditating.’

The people on this street are as interesting as anyone.

Or we could just get in the Trans Am.

The path to god, whispers a little sparrow.

 

John Colburn

John Colburn is the author of Invisible Daughter (firthFORTH Books, 2013), Psychedelic Norway (Coffee House Press, 2013), dear corpse (Spuyten Duyvil, 2018), and unabandonment (Spuyten Duyvil, 2021) as well as four chapbooks of poetry. He lives in St. Paul, MN, and is one of the publishers/editors in the Spout Press collective.

Capsule Biography Number 5 – Luisa Guerra

April 2025 | fiction

In April of 1968, Luisa Guerra created Eseidra, a board game she says has been played to completion by 11 people over 20 years. This claim has been contested. “No one has ever finished a round of Eseidra,” wrote Phillip McKenzie in the gaming journal Squaare. “It is nearly as impossible to understand the rules of the game as it is to know when a match has ended. Furthermore, combatants who abandon the game in frustration may not even realize they are continuing, in some manner, to play it.”

Critics contend the game fosters a type of compulsion. Guerra considers this a virtue. “The hallmark of any successful amusement is its ability to elicit obsession,” she has said.

Guerra made her name and fortune with Around the Whirl!, a multi-player dice-and-card game that sold in the tens of thousands worldwide after its release in 1962. Though Around the Whirl! was credited with ushering in an era of so-called “heavy logic” gaming, Guerra eventually disavowed the game, citing not only “the dreary conventionality of its objectives, strategy, and maneuvering,” but also “the abominable illustrations on the board, box, and instruction sheet. It is an ugly game in all respects.”

In interviews, Guerra has often invoked a piece of family lore to explain her interest in games. Following the Sergeants’ Revolt in Cuba in 1933, Guerra’s father was to be executed behind a hotel in Havana for alleged loyalty to Gerardo Machado, when an officer with the assigned firing squad recognized the condemned man as a champion backgammon player. The man offered to play Guerra’s father a single game of backgammon and promised to spare his life if he won. “I credit my existence to a double-six my father rolled in the lobby of the Hotel Nacional,” Guerra has said.

In her early-thirties, following a tumultuous divorce, Guerra began experimenting with board games she called, alternately, “transcendental” and “infinite.” Early efforts yielded games whose rules shifted according to readings of players’ heart rates, games whose “boards” were the given physical environment of the players, and games that included increasingly perilous feats of physical endurance.

In 1985, following an estrangement from two of her four children, Guerra moved to Hibiscus Coast in New Zealand. She denies all requests for interviews and does not respond to letters or phone calls. She publishes an annual “update” in the magazine Straits of the number of Eseidra games active worldwide (last year’s tally was 32), though she offers no explanation for her accounting. In 1986, in what may be read as an act of apostasy or pique or both, she stated that several members of the Lisbon Circle have been playing Eseidra for twenty years now, even if they claim ignorance of the fact. Sembla Intelligencer – March 6, 1988

 

Ben Guterson

Ben Guterson is the New York Times bestselling author of The World-Famous Nine, a Barnes & Noble Young Reader Pick of the Month, The Einsteins of Vista Point, and the popular Winterhouse trilogy. Winterhouse was an Edgar Award and an Agatha Award finalist, and an Indie Next List Pick. His books have been translated into eleven languages worldwide.

Tresha Faye Haefner

April 2025 | poetry

What nobody tells you about marriage is

 

It’s blackheads and popping

pustules. It’s watching someone

get old in the shower. Its tweezers

and hair in the drain and knowing

where the scissors are. It’s three

hour long fights about what kind

of litter to buy at the pet store

and knowing you are both responsible

for all those egg shells. Both on the hook

for that $60 parking ticket, no matter

whose fault it was. It’s remembering

the good times, and also getting undressed

down to your worst layers. It’s lying

on the bed in a pile of your own tears

from laughing so hard, and it’s like having

a mirror that follows you around reciting

everything you’ve ever done

wrong. It’s agreeing to destroy someone

else’s life together – your children,

your neighbors’ peace and quiet.

It’s mutually disappointing your parents

by trying to follow your dreams,

and its fruit flies because somebody left

orange peels under the bed, somebody left

tissue paper in the sink, somebody didn’t clean

out the blender again. It’s knowing

what they had for breakfast, demanding

they leave some over, demanding they pick up

bread on the way home, pick up the orange juice,

pick up their goddamn socks from the living room.

It’s asking someone to pass the salt and open

the blinds and hand you that thing off the shelf

and knowing what that thing is.

It’s confessing that you’re still unhappy,

that their love isn’t enough to fix you.

It’s slamming windows, and books and screens.

It’s walking into the other room and slamming

the door shut. It’s knowing there are no working

locks on the door. It’s knowing when you lie

to yourself, somebody will catch you

like a net catches a trapeze artist

or a fish that’s wriggling in the sea.

 

 

What I did while waiting to become famous on instagram

 

I worked in a daycare.

I took the names of the tired mothers,

the hurried fathers. I gathered

emergency contacts, checked

for allergies, for ear infections, for anything I should know.

With the older kids, I recapped

the markers, folded

paper into airplanes, pulled

Barbie’s decapitated head

out of the toilet every day

after lunch. I helped

fill the bottles. Helped

handle the diapers. Helped

empty the waste baskets, rerolled

the toilet paper.

Between shifts I made appointments

for my ailing parents, made calls

to my sister to ask

how her invitro was going,

if there was anything I could bring.

I made $10/hour. Paid

my taxes. For a whole year I gave up

eating peanut butter because of other people’s allergies.

For 9 months I lifted someone else’s baby

to my milkless breast

and tended to the future,

with its immediate, anonymous needs.

 

Tresha Faye Haefner

Tresha Faye Haefner’s poetry appears or is forthcoming in several journals and magazines, most notably Blood Lotus, Blue Mesa Review, The Cincinnati Review, Five South, Hunger Mountain, Mid-America Review, Pirene’s Fountain, Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, Radar, Rattle, TinderBox, and Up the Staircase Quarterly. Her work has garnered several accolades, including the 2011 Robert and Adele Schiff Poetry Prize and three Pushcart nominations. Her first manuscript, “Pleasures of the Bear,” was a finalist for prizes from Moon City Press and Glass Lyre Press. Find out more on her Substack at thepoetrysalonstack.substack.com.

Zack Carson

April 2025 | poetry

Slum Archangel

 

The velocity of her fall must have

been excruciating / blackout-inducing.

Tracing the arc of the angel’s nosedive:

deadlift-dropped like Heaven metal and sparking

all the way down, uranium-heavy,

she would have cleaved the evening sky in two.

Then, molten from friction, crawling beyond

 

her crater, bones reform before moonrise.

A new wingspan flares. Her raw material:

lightning voltage, forest fires, charcoal.

Blue from down here looks so much darker…

There is no angel that can be touched

who isn’t remade in the diamond-crushing

gravity of hurtling earthside.

 

Quite an experience to crash on the world

as if through stained glass, to collapse into time:

serration is the sky we are fated

to drop through to understand how grace works.

I guess we must be sliced apart to reveal

the cold metallic core of grace within

and then feel its trembling pour down skin.

 

But I’m not so sure about its value.

Grace’s slow attainment looks like bleeding

just to make the claim you didn’t drown beneath

the bleed. Unseemly to think devastation

is our only flight path towards perfection.

Hauled down at night like a burning Lockheed,

every angel is born to land hard.

 

 

Abjex

 

Twist away the gates of steel

Unlock the secret voice

Give in to ancient noise

Take a chance on a brand new dance

Twist away, now twist and shout…

—Devo, “Gates of Steel”

 

The rogue’s gallery: two tattoo artists,

two bartenders, and me. This band was a

nosebleed miracle. All my amplifiers

died in separate fires (too much voltage). At

showtime we exploded like landmine shrapnel.

There were some real bruisers in that unit,

dressed like Hell. Bullet belts, engineer boots,

 

burned leather, unending appetites

for damage. Harrison swallowed a lit

cigarette as a party trick. Allie had

angel language on her face. Bad Wes

coughed and bled blackly under a moon that held

still like a sharpshooter. Josh had this strange

magnetic animal charm practically

 

sewn into the skin-side of his life.

I just bore witness, wrapped in my battle

jacket and doing my best to keep up.

An audience member spit on Allie

one time so she broke his nose. If any

member of the gang yelled “Go!” it was all hell:

we’re throwing hockey punches ’til it’s lights out.

 

We kissed goodbye with our hands taped. The band’s life

burned at the speed of head trauma. This is

how I learned to pounce on the world boots-first.

 

 

Zack Carson

Zack Carson is a poet and musician from Asheville, NC. He is pursuing an MFA at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. His work has been (or will be) published in The Shore, Soundings East, All Existing, and Inscape, among other places.