In This Issue
Jeremiah A. Gilbert
Jeremiah A. Gilbert Jeremiah Gilbert is an award-winning photographer and travel writer based out of Southern California. His travels have taken him to over a hundred countries and territories spread across six continents. His photography has been published...
Rebecca Pyle
Rebecca Pyle Rebecca Pyle is an artist whose work (drawings, photographs, oil paintings) appears as images in many art/literary journals, including MAYDAY, Watershed Review, TINT, The Moving Force Journal, New England Review, Gris-Gris, West Trestle Review and La...
Fabio Sassi
Fabio Sassi Fabio Sassi makes photos and acrylics using whatever is considered to have no worth by the mainstream. He often puts a quirky twist to his subjects or employs an unusual perspective that gives a new angle of view. Fabio lives in Bologna, Italy, and his...
Lucha
I attended a party hosted by one of my university English professors. The party was timid. Everyone in a house full of friendless people. Soon, I see my professor is flirting on my date. I am across the patio talking to a stoned lonely classmate near the nacho salsa...
Jim Ross
Jim Ross Jim Ross jumped into creative pursuits in 2015 after rewarding career in public health research. With graduate degree from Howard University, in eight years he's published nonfiction, fiction, poetry, photography, hybrid, interviews, and plays in nearly 200...
Faultless Weapons Handling
ankle-winged Word Thief flutters ~ orbiting The Muse wicker creel on shoulder stealing words off succumbing tongue, from depraved pink lips collecting manifestos, dispatches, commands, lexeme-threads for unborn poems. deliciously spilled onto insatiable empty page...
Cecil Morris
What Does Persephone Want? Our daughter Persephone comes and goes. She plays peek-a-boo with Oxycodone and Ambien. She likes it in the dark, a paradox for when she goes she takes our sun with her and leaves us only night. When she returns, she brings...
The Coat
She saw the coat. Its colors and its wool and its plaid and its extremely careful collar rounded to fit a grown-up man and make him happy—all this contained in the glass storefront window—and its dryness in the humid air yet its ability to contain the magic charge of...
Madrid
Tang of ammonia, the yellow bins outside our apartment. Fetor of urine, cardboard sheets in an abandoned doorway. The girl who brushes past us in the cathedral, sweat, cologne, and the sweet remains of her night lying in her lover’s arms. Didn’t the men who...
Queen’s Gambit
Sweat loosened the bandages covering the welts on Billy’s buttocks as he dribbled up court. The black road colors of his uniform masked the blood stains. On the sidelines, Coach shouted instructions. Coach had the best players in the city, often the state,...
Savannah
Alicia pulled over at her ex’s house to allow the storm time to pass. They were not-unwillingly stranded in the darkness, submerged in a pile of greasy pizza boxes and crushed beer cans. Rain pounded the roof in violent sheets. He lit emergency candles and crafted a...
We Are the Enablers
Although I’m not particularly fond of violence, I decided to watch the TV miniseries “World without End.” It’s a Medieval butchery, maybe along the lines of “Game of Thrones,” which I haven’t seen. Anyway, I watched the first hour of this curious pastiche of 21st...
Metaphysical Exam
She begins: How have your spirits been? Tell me your name. Where we are right now. The day of the week. Have you noticed any smells that others around you cannot sense? Such as the smell of charred toast— or honeysuckle? Do you feel this? She touches across my...
Featured Artist, DM Frech
DM Frech DM Frech holds a BFA and MFA in dance from the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. She has worked at the Governor's School of the Arts in Virginia and is an active member of several writing organizations, including The Muse Writers Center,...
Featured Author, Ditta Baron Hoeber
Untitled (Coke was taller than most women) Coke was taller than most women and moved in a way that somehow provoked anticipation watching her cross a room you wondered if this splendid thing would actually happen to you same with her voice with...
Jack Bordnick Studio
Jack Bordnick Studio Bordnick's interest is to create meaningful works of art that all people and cultures can enjoy. As a photographer and sculptor, he has been able to share his professional experiences in ways that benefit both business and community projects. With...
A Death of Logic
In another dimension, it is me & not Dostoevsky who claims 2-plus-2 can equal 5. I have pressed TV rewind enough times to see how toothpaste can slide right back into the tube after dissolving across teeth & draining into the sink. The vomit...
Time Travel Sublet
By the time I realized why this sublet was so cheap, it was too late—I was being tortured by the Inquisition. In case you were wondering, it was nothing like the Monty Python skit. How awesome would that have been? Well, it doesn’t help that I started giggling when...
Paternity Test
His hair has grown the shock of sunflowers after rain. The smell of those threshed stalks, nosegay against variant ills— he also loves the man-fox after musty plum tomatoes which, having brazened wooden stakes, now devolve seed-ward. How his mother swells uneasily...
We Can’t Own These Bodies
That evening you drove us out on the bruised southern beach we lost the hope we’d find the words to match the gold slant of sunlight’s sail across Gulf Coast swells and sand. We stood in the empty lobby, luggage in tow full of secrets, two people, houseless together,...
AudioDreamscape
There's only so much you can change about yourself. Like this morning, I dreamt I dropped a baby down the stairs and trumpets started playing As it stared through me with my own eyes like I'd just suicided. Flavors of trauma come with malleable parts. Today, I ate an...
The Empath
It’s always the rot stench of the wound that draws me in—the beetle to the Corpse Flower. You were eager to unfurl your bruised blooms: you told me about the poverty, the prison, your abusive, alcoholic father. You winced to mention him. A palpable stab. I ached to...
Outside their Circle
They finished each other’s sentences about the differences between ’56 and ’57 Chevies, how they rebuilt transmissions, how the Hurst shifters needed a hole drilled in the floorboard, as I sat in the back seat hearing tales of another country. Their dads knew...
Seeing Stars
A house built on sand makes itself felt when a mother hides glasses of whiskey in the drawers of her vanity table. That our family was special and blessed was the wishful fiction read to us children at bedtime. Asteroid and disaster are linguistic siblings; the Milky...
Weird in a Normal World
The table is long, filled with empty plates, glasses, and a steaming pitcher of coffee. Everyone is smiling, and grandpa has an eyebrow cocked in a sassy way at the camera. The plates are red, and they nearly blend in with the teak table. A light on the wall shines...
Behind the Garden Wall
A cracked skull the constables told me, must have happened when I hit the flagstone walkway. And the bruises, obviously caused by my convulsions. There was no doubt in their minds that I had succumbed to a fit of hysteria, which was perfectly understandable...
Jim Ross
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, in eight years, he's published nonfiction, fiction, poetry, photography, hybrid, interviews, and plays in...
Holly Willis
Holly Willis Holly Willis is a hybrid artist/theorist working primarily in film, video, and still photography. Her work often examines the materiality of the image within a broader context of new materialist philosophy and the histories of experimental film, video,...
Only real bitches play bingo.
I’m talking the bitches who bring their own dotting pens—the variety pack that includes the bonus glitter pen in fuschia. The bitches who bring their own refreshments and candies for when their blood sugar inevitably drops when the bitch across the room yells bingo on...
The Everything Life
It was after a single glass of Gruner that I decided to throw it all away. I opened the “everything drawer” in my kitchen. Everyone has an everything drawer, right? A drawer crammed with the innumerable yet unremarkable artifacts of life. From a young age, or maybe...
Prison of Thought
My life is obsession without passion, compulsion without end, disorder without rhyme or reason. A chemical maelstrom dragging my free will into the crushing ink-black of hopelessness. Hands bleed in perpetual cleanliness next to no god. Grey matter overclocked,...
Lawrence Bridges
Lawrence Bridges Lawrence Bridges is best known for work in the film and literary world. His photographs have recently appeared in the Las Laguna Art Gallery 2023, Humana Obscura, Wanderlust a Travel Journal, the London Photo Festival, Light Space & Time...
Pahadisoul
Pahadisoul Pahadisoul (Akshita Sharma) is a gifted cinematographer and photographer based in the vibrant city of Mumbai. With a heart that beats for storytelling and an unshakable love for the great outdoors, she has carved her niche as a visual artist who breathes...
The Orchard
My father hated coyotes, implicated them in every “missing pet” poster we passed. I didn’t understand, not really, until they took my dog. They must have been just beyond the fence, eyes glittering an amber light, like yellow flames in the dimness, yipping,...
Jane Hammons taught writing for three decades at UC Berkeley, where she received a Distinguished Teaching Award. Upon retirement, she moved to Austin, Texas, for five years before returning home to New Mexico. Her writing appears in numerous journals and anthologies: Alaska Quarterly Review, Southwestern American Literature, The Main Street Rag, Yellow Medicine Review, Hint Fiction, (Norton), The EastOver Anthology of Rural Writers of Color, 2023 and 2024, The Maternal is Political (Seal Press), and Selected Memories, (Hippocampus Books). She enjoys photography as part of her writing practice, and three of her photographs are included in Taking It To the Streets: A Visual History of Protest and Demonstration, an exhibition of the Austin History Center. She is an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation.
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Michael C. Roberts is a retired pediatric psychologist and professor. He has digital and film photographs in Burningword, The Canary, The Storms, FERAL, Cholla Needles, Cantos, The Healing Muse, Cold Moon, Right Hand Pointing, Door is a Jar, Camas, Hindsight, Straylight, Thimble, Ponder, Closed Eye Open, Alchemy Spoon, 3rd Wednesday, The Right Words, Cardinal Sins, Human Obscura, Blue Mesa Review, The Word’s Faire, and elsewhere. In his recent photography, he has been exploring minimalism as projection and abstraction. The simplicity of minimalism reduces both nature and the human-made to their basics, revealing the essential beauty in structure and form. Although austere, these silhouetted images of nature allow the viewer to appreciate the world’s simple complexity and basic beauty.
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