In This Issue
Michael Roberts, Featured Artist
Michael C. Roberts 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,...
Jane Hammons, Featured Author
Signal Texas dawns humid green anole at my feet skims hot deck planks pink dewlap pulses orchid throbs crimson anole gutters along downspout adhesive toepads cling release skitter lust out of view in caliche cactus wood chip garden When sun...
Carston Anderson
Carston Anderson Carston Anderson is currently a graduate student in Boston, Massachusetts
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...
Kenneth Boyd
Hot Rhythm Archibald Motley (United States, 1961) The backbone of surprise is fusing speed with secrecy. Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831) If this dream could dance, I’d feel it in my veins Circulating in rhythms of dazzling dances The fusion of primitive...
Dawson Steeber
Are You Coming Back Last night I tossed and turned, the night torn mad with slamming doors and clanging radiators. I threw pillows and covers all over the room, woke in a terrible cold sweat. I walked to the kitchen gingerly, feeling the swollen, sore pad of my foot...
Michael Horton
Ping Pong The house was a gift—picture perfect weekend luxury on the lake. From their three daughters. They were all doing well, money wasn’t a hurdle, and they wanted to show their parents a good time. Just relax. Sit on the dock. Hold hands, the oldest adds. They’d...
Amy Agape
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....
Jamey Hecht
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...
Steve Deutsch
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...
Kyle Selley
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...
Kimm Brockett Stammen
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...
Emma Sywyj
Emma Sywyj Emma Sywyj is an award-winning artist and photographer who has been creating art for twenty years. For five of those years, she was based in London, studying photography at Camberwell College of Arts, UAL. From there, she received a BA in Photography and a...
Robert Miner
The general’s family selects an earth spirit for his mausoleum Tang Dynasty, China May I say you bring great honor to the artisans of our studio by seeking our earth spirits for the general’s tomb? The widow, sitting on a stone bench with her two sons, nodded...
Fabio Sassi
Fabio Sassi Fabio Sassi creates photographs and acrylics using materials considered worthless by the mainstream. He often puts a quirky twist on his subjects or employs an unusual perspective that offers a fresh angle. Fabio lives in Bologna, Italy, and his work can...
Grace Lynn
My Muse is Growing Up My muse wears prescription glasses, so she’ll never see beyond the village with its walled-in acres of poolside loungers. Plus, she quit her diet, so her diaphragm gags her esophagus and larynx. I’ll find another voice...
Richard Holinger
Diapers In rural northern Illinois northwest of Chicago, a raised, pressed, gray gravel path, long ago a railroad track, runs straight for miles, bordered by trees. On one side, farmers harvest their cornfields, green John Deere combines and tractors stirring up more...
John Dorroh
My Daddy Was an Omnivore He drank coffee in the wee hours long before the sun oozed its way up over the hardwoods at the end of the property. He played Solitaire and smoked Camels before he woke all of us up to begin our day. My mother had to be at work by 7. Daddy...
Priscilla Long
One Day in the Life of Donna DeSimone Donna, you will never become less deaf, her audiologist informs. Keep learning, she encourages herself. In ASL she has reached the letter L. Keep living. She buses down to Pike Place Market to purchase potatoes and greens, maybe...
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, he has, in ten years, published nonfiction, fiction, poetry, photography, hybrid works, interviews, and plays in...
Carlos Cunha
Monochrome Lane The strip mall may well be on its last legs, but it still litters the landscape of many American towns and suburbs, especially here in Florida – an aggressively charmless, deservedly unloved suburban phenomenon that usually consists of nothing more...
Dotty LeMieux
When the Neighbors Sell their Knock-Down in Just Four Years for Twice What They Paid for it They spiff it up, repair old siding, cut into the crumbling hillside to squeeze in a bonus room. Throw on a coat of paint, shiny like a chrome-plated lie. Bucolic gem...
Avital Gad-Cykman
Clockwise Quite late into my pregnancy, the day I eventually did pregnancy tests and all three came out positive (Surprise! I’m here!), my husband said he’d always yearned to be a father, (Have I developed something new? These are voices outside!), a statement of...
Francine Witte
Test This is a test. A heartbeat test. A bloodbeat test. My doctor tells me I'm going to die. This is certain. I want to tell the doctor it's OK My doctor is a quack. Quick homemade remedies -- everything to cure halitosis and eczema. You can't leave his office...
Lizbeth Bárcena
Arid Land Thermophilia love for the desert heat / a cautionary affair I don’t feel overjoyed or conceited to hear people bitch about heat in a hot place, in late May, amid what’s befalling the Earth– It’s two degrees more– think less clothing, more...
Tetman Callis
Tetman Callis Tetman Callis is a writer and artist who lives in Chicago. His stories have been published in a variety of literary venues, most recently including BULL, Tahoma Literary Review, Elm Leaves Journal, Anti-Heroin Chic, Running Wild Press: Short Story...
June Chua
Fever Dream You are about 7, skinny, sheathed in a flaxen knit dress. Margarine yellow. You are persuaded by the son of your godmother, your namesake, to climb through a large, wooden fence into a meadow. It’s late June, your month. You have only been on this new...
Joan E. Bauer
A Kat, a Mouse, a Brick Be not harsh with ‘Krazy.’ He is but a shadow of himself caught in the web of this mortal skein. —George Herriman (1880-1944) Charlie Chaplin, Jack Kerouac, R. Crumb, Quentin Tarantino. Krazy Kat has some loyal fans. Cartoonist...
Sarah Sorensen
So You’ve Decided to Convert Your Middle-Aged Bedroom into a Magical Forest But All You Have is Amazon and Weed Take the edible and ask yourself which discount rug seems most like grass. Whisper the now popular refrain “touch grass.” Then make sure that it...
Billie Jean Stratton
Objects From The Pyramid Collection: A Catalog of Personal Growth And Exploration Mystic body dust things that come to us Oils of ecstasy fuel for allergies Karma Sutra candles life that's hard to handle Pleasure enhancers nude dancers...
Alina Zollfrank
Identity You have a love-hate relationship with eagles. It’s the national animal for your home nest, also the national emblem for your chosen nest. In the end, it’s all just a bunch of letters and feathers. If you’re lucky, some numbers, too, but let’s be honest, your...
Michelle Strausbaugh
Not Another Tragic Fattie Your new sixth-grade class already had its own rhythms, inside jokes, and hierarchy. Like, it was already over halfway through the school year. And there was this fat girl—like really fat. Like, nearly 200lbs-fat. She was such a nerd. Like,...
DM Frech, Featured Artist
DM Frech DM Frech has a BFA and an MFA in dance from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and is a member of The Muse, Poetry Society of VA, The Writers Guild of Virginia, James River Writers, KPC Writers, Virginia Writers, and so on. She writes poetry,...
Cindy Wheeler, Featured Author
The Desire to Sink It was, for the first twenty-four an anvil. No, a dozen anvils pressing me into the hotel bed. I was glad for them, hoping they might press me into nothingness, where I thought you might be. In my dream I decorated them with flowers and snot. When I...
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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