Amy Agape

January 2026 | nonfiction

If You Were There

If you were there, you surely would have noticed the scarlet slash cleaving the soft brown fuzz. Her roly-poly-curved shrunken shape. White sheets, once crisp, now softened by sweat. Darkened room illuminated regularly for blood draws, IV exchanges.

You would have heard her on the phone. Do you have avocados? Maybe bring one of those. And toast? Black beans too, those might work. Oh, a wheat tortilla and some grilled chicken. I can make a little taco. Maybe a bite of that will stay down. Ice cream, too, please, sometimes that’s okay. Something cold to drink – maybe Pepsi? No, Sprite.

Then, turning to me, “Can you believe it? My mom and sisters took my daughter. They were supposed to pick up pizza, bring it back here to eat with me. That would have been nice, right? They just texted that they are coming later, after they’ve finished eating. Why couldn’t they just eat here with me? Now I’m starving, and it may be too late to be able to hold anything down. That’s not nice of them, is it?”

You would have witnessed a woman arriving with a stack of cards. “You’ve got lots to do, Sis. I planned for all the birthdays, the graduations, even their weddings.” Maybe you would have recognized appropriation disguised as altruism.

You likely would have noted the numbers scattered throughout her questions. Will I be here 2 months from now? Can you believe the nurses have to wear gowns and gloves to hand me this 1 little pill? What should I tell my 3 children? Do you think they realize I may only have 14 days to live?

You never would have noticed:

A scar, mollified by years, a kind of cleavage under my blouse

Me alone in the bed, my family out for burgers

Suppressed shame that I was unable to write letters to my kids like the dying mom on Oprah

The newspaper clipping shared by a friend – a grief camp for kids with dead parents

My own numbers: 2 weeks to live; 12 previous cases, all diagnosed by autopsy; 3 major surgeries and dozens of procedures; 25 bonus years

An infant son learning to walk in my hospital room

His younger sister, not even arrived by that hospital room but present for all the following ones with the new scars and new guilt and new hope and new joy

 

You may have noticed me grab her hand, look into her eyes, whisper, “I’m here.”

 

Amy Agape

Amy Agape, PhD, provides spiritual companionship to hospitalized individuals and their families. This work, rooted in her own experience with a rare illness, invites her to listen deeply to others’ stories and explore the ways they interweave with her own. Amy dreams of a world where all people experience the profound blessing of being companioned with loving presence. She intends to spend the remainder of her days helping to create that world.

Jamey Hecht

January 2026 | fiction

Perv Circus

The annual Perv Circus celebrated its first decade with a huge bash at the Grand Palace Hotel. Nobody could have brought it off with more panache or bigger profits than Charlie Pinkhaus, known to his entourage as “The Founder.” Charlie knew hundreds of the right sort of people for his Circus: men and women who were loaded with liquid cash; troubled enough to need nearly constant stimulation; and unlikely to blow the whistle on the dark shenanigans he orchestrated, every June, within the private chambers of his own hotel chain’s flagship location. The Grand Palace Hotel was a maze of dark walnut panels twenty-two feet high. Most of the walls were crowded with canvasses, photographs in frames, textiles, tiles, and objects somebody had insisted were art, so they were.

Senators and bankers, writers and high fashion people, actors and sex workers—every sort from every part of the world eventually hit the Perv Circus. One night drew two astronomers and a veterinarian. And lonesome Charlie’s favorite: a recently civilized barbarian.

 

Jamey Hecht

Jamey Hecht, PhD, PsyD, LMFT, is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Brooklyn, NY. His two poetry books to date are Limousine, Midnight Blue: Fifty Frames from the Zapruder Film (Red Hen Press, 2009), and Dodo Feathers: Poems 1989-2019 (IPB, 2019). His other three books are about Plato, Sophocles, and Homer. Hecht’s poems, fiction, and scholarship have appeared in two dozen periodicals, including American Short Fiction, Black Warrior Review, Massachusetts Review, Arion, Rattle, The Pinch, English Literary History, The 16th Century Journal, American Imago, and the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. jameyhechtauthor.com

Steve Deutsch

January 2026 | poetry

After,

 

we took

the long way

home.

 

As if such

a simple act

might flummox fate.

 

We are

a good people.

We bury our dead

 

and help

the maimed

to cross the road.

 

Yet the image

persists.

One careless step

 

along

the poorly

cobbled avenue,

 

and Atropos

snips

the thread.

 

Steve Deutsch

Steve Deutsch is the poetry editor of Centered Magazine and was the first poet in residence at the Bellefonte Art Museum. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net Prize multiple times. He has six volumes of Poetry. One, Brooklyn, won the Sinclair Poetry Prize.

Kyle Selley

January 2026 | visual art

Material Landscape - Kyle Selley

Material Landscape

Scale Invariant - Kyle Selley

Scale Invariant

Kyle Selley

Kyle Selley draws with explosive residue. Explosions and their indexical marks are naturally celestial, producing tactile residue that echoes stellar formations. Across scales, he’s found patterns of residual dust, energy radiating outward, order surfacing through chaos, and fractals emerging. Combustible material inscribes scale-invariant traces. He guides it, but this medium expands mark-making beyond what his hand can do. There’s tension between control and volatile chance, between what he intends and what the material insists on. Chaos theory and emergence theory describe principles that govern supernovae and fireworks alike. The work collapses cosmic distances to a human scale, making stellar nebulae accessible for close investigation—residue as primary content. Selley reframes the explosion as contemplative echoes rather than spectacle. What was cosmic becomes intimate. The viewer sits inches from what resembles light-years, examining the same dust and patterns that govern stellar birth.

Kimm Brockett Stammen

January 2026 | fiction

Waves

 

The ship wasn’t rocking, still there was a sensation of lilting movement,

of repeated unbalancing and rebalancing,

as she leaned over the railing and reached out to the waves far below.

 

The instant before he approached, she felt that someone would approach.

 

He, on the other hand, as he said later, barely knew what was happening, before, during or after.

 

Their spouses were generally the planners.

Like all their vacations, her husband and his wife had arranged the cruise.

Their spouses didn’t plan this.

 

The four of them met at horse shoes on the second day, and since then had done much together: dined on huge Scampi, explored overrun harbor towns, laughed sparsely at a comedy show. A continent separated the two couples, but attitude and circumstance made them compatible, and also, as is always the case with compatibility: values. They believed in love and loyalty, and had thought the two as complementary as sea and sky, past and future.  On each of their monogamies depended entire infrastructures of children, families, careers, houses, investments, vacations, pets, landscapings, plans.

 

“Beautiful,” he said as he leant next to her against the railing.

And she knew he meant the evening and the ocean,

the breeze and the sensation of floating far from the tethering land—

but she also knew, or hoped, or knew what was meant by her hoping, that he meant her.

 

They fell in love.

They fell in love and they loved.

They fell in love and they loved and there seemed to be no choice at all.

 

Is there ever?

 

Ten years later, in a hotel in a midwestern city, where they could each stop over occasionally on the way to elsewhere, they were naked together. Even as memory, their nakedness always stunned: a green flash of recognition at sunset or sunrise; a breech from ocean sleep; a perpetual instant of waking.  They talked over once and again all their inevitable subjects: commitment, hopelessness, incongruence, boat-rocking. How their infrastructures—teens and young adults, aging parents, retirements, downsizings, dividends, vacations, small mounds interspersed in their landscapes, more plans—continued, and yet they two who supported those infrastructures were infinitely different. Or perhaps not. Perhaps they been these people all along, these awful people, and had just needed each other to learn it.

 

“It’s time,” she said, and he knew before she said it that she would say it.

 

She, on the other hand, barely knew what she was saying.

 

Still, they took other cruises, there were other lilting sensations, sometimes they reached out, or remembered reaching out, or sensed that they would—unbalancing and rebalanced—reach out from their opposite sides of the continent, to the waves.

 

Kimm Brockett Stammen

Kimm Brockett Stammen’s story collection, In a Country Whose Language I Have Never Mastered, was a finalist for the Iron Horse Book Contest and the 2022 Eludia Award. Her writings have appeared or are forthcoming in Chautauqua, december, CARVE, Pembroke, Prime Number, and over thirty other literary magazines, and her work has been nominated for Pushcart, Best Short Fiction, and Best Microfiction anthologies. She holds an MFA from the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Creative and Professional Writing at Spalding University. kimmbrockettstammen.wordpress.com