In This Issue
Immigrant Sisters at the End of the World
Between 1860 and 1939, thousands of poor young women from Eastern European shtetls were sold into sexual slavery by the Jewish-run Zwi Migdal crime syndicate which controlled highly profitable brothels in Brazil, Argentina and the U.S. How to pry open the iris...
Another One About Birds
Specifically, the girl falling hard enough from the saddle to clack her teeth. Just under my favorite tree. The man: lean into it. (He does, the tree.) Unicycle’s like walking on your hands. You’re always in a state of almost falling. Lean into it or you land on your...
Under the Texan Sun
Bernadette lives in a flat house in West Texas. She often forgets being old until she walks past a mirror or a window and sees the skinny, slightly hunched, somewhat wrinkled body she knows is now hers. She ignores it by keeping busy, tending to the flowers and trees...
It’s Ungodly Cold in Kahramanmaraş
When I google Turkey earthquake photos, I find a man sitting amidst broken concrete slabs, holding the hand of his daughter, her body sandwiched between mattress and pancaked upper floors. Her hand is smooth and white, spared from the broken and slid. Her palm is...
Tracey Dean Widelitz
Tracey Dean Widelitz Tracey Dean Widelitz is a published writer, poet and photographer. She is the author of the published children’s book A Heavenly World. Her personal experience of pet loss would later become her first children’s book A Heavenly World. Her poetry...
A Persistence of Cormorants
I live near Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal, a toxic and fetid tidal estuary from its salted harbor mouth to its abrupt industrial end. It is my pixel of wilderness in the city. Tonight I heard the night heron quawk— Thought it was a ghost. Flight is silence, a...
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,...
Carella is a writer and digital artist who splits her time between the ethereal world of dreams and Toronto, Canada, depending on the weather. Her work involves themes of mental health, nature, and sexuality, often in a surrealist tone. Many of her short stories jigsaw together into a magical realism narrative, and she is currently working on the connective tissue for a fiction collection. Her debut poetry collection, Undercover Butterfly, was published in May 2026 by Dark Thirty Poetry Publishing and is available for purchase. She is the 2023 Door is a Jar Writing Award winner in nonfiction and the Fall 2025 Cardinal Sins first-place award recipient in fiction. She has received multiple nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net and is the featured artist for the Fall 2024 issue of Blue Earth Review. Her work previously appeared in Burningword 104 and 114, and in numerous literary journals including Columbia Journal, BULL Lit Mag, Berkeley Fiction Review, Ponder Review, Wizards in Space and Tangled Locks. Her art is featured on the covers of over a dozen literary journals, including Glassworks Magazine, Nightingale and Sparrow, Cosmic Daffodil, Silk Road Review, In Parentheses, and Straylight Magazine.
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Linda K Allison finds everything more interesting with a camera in her hand. A recovering banker, Linda now spends her time writing short stories and pursuing her passion for photography. Linda considers herself an “eye photographer.” She sees the shot wherever she goes and enjoys exploring her subjects from unique perspectives. It’s not uncommon to find her on the ground or in other unusual, occasionally alarming positions, seeking the perfect photograph. In 2019, Linda decided to travel without her Canon SLR and the heavy assortment of lenses she was accustomed to. Instead, she shot a ten-day trip to Portugal with nothing but her iPhone. She’s never looked back. The pictures in this issue of Burningword Literary Journal were taken with an iPhone 17 Pro and an iPhone 13 Pro. You can typically find Linda among the trees in The Woodlands, Texas, where she lives with the love of her life.
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