In This Issue

V Club

Remember Twiggy, her skeletal body was all the rave. That led us to Form the V Club.  Teachers thought we meant Glee club. (Not V for Vomit) It wasn’t until three 8th grade girls were taken away in an ambulance that the school got wise. I was called the Ring Leader...

Everywhere All the Time (with a Line from Ashley Capps)

I hear a shotgun crack and find mother at the woodpile—she’s shot another rat snake. “But,” I say, “they keep the rabbit population down?” “I like rabbits,” is her reply. “But your garden,” I say. “Nothing anyone can do about that,” she sighs.   Here, it’s...

An entry journal

Feb or March 17, 1995 As my suitcase orbits away from me, I surprise myself by shouting “our bag.” Unbeknownst to me I have begun talking in plural. As we drive toward our home, I am puzzled by the empty sidewalks. The man who’s both from here and there assures me...

The Museum of Future Affairs

To go back is as hard almost as forward.   We all got a little silence lodged in our molars some time   in middle school, mostly. Field trips to the museum of future affairs,   long bus rides, behind the glass our taxidermied bodies   in frozen...

From across the Tracks

Up county, here in Mount Kisco, the men from across the tracks wait patiently at the station every weekday morning, not for a train, but a day job, seated on the edge of the sidewalk or against the fence, near where cars enter to drop off or pick up, all expectantly...

A grasshopper in tall grass

I. The Buddhas tell us not   to think of a heaven, of a hell…   This breath comes. That breath goes.   Then nothing.   II. Klara Dan von Neumann,   drove from home to the beach—   walked into the surf and   III. Woolf wrote:  ...

On Reading Auden to the Ghost of a Lost Limerence

In the Peabody Library reading room, a ramshackle longing has liberty to roam, While the rhetoric of busybodied reality bustles without and within The center of self-knowing. Beneath the architraves scrolled with Grecian ghosts, And over the bookcases crimped dense...

Featured Author, Mark Crimmins

WORKEROLICK There’s a run on peaches. Soon the shelves in Produce are empty. I go down to the basement to get more. When I step out of the lift into the warehouse, I see my boss. Disco Dez. There he is in his bellbottoms, bouncing what looks like a tennis ball on the...

Fertility

It was spring, no I mean dusk, and the killdeer began stepping up out of intricate doors in the field.   They sported unseen fires beneath their downy vests.   Their presence had been warming the soil before the corn crop, except for their dead sisters,...

What to Wear When Having a Drink with Your Ex

It has been forty years. he in New York me in San Francisco. erasing him with ease for forty years. yet he is coming and wants to meet for a drink. really? does he regret   the divorce and realize he fucked up by sleeping with Sally and Sara and Sue? spending weekends...

Aidan J Hong

  Aidan J Hong is a sophomore at Seoul International School in Seongnam, Korea. His passion for arts is geared towards architecture and art history. He also develops ideation on journalism, environmental concerns, archeology, and more. Aidan plans to continue...

Jihu Kim

  Jihu Kim is a junior at Yongsan International School of Seoul, South Korea. Her art practice began with an interest in art history. She is the founder of her school’s Art of Korea club and studies art conservation. Skilled in traditional art forms, she applies...

Jian Kim

  Jian Kim is an 11th grader student attending St. Johnsbury Academy Jeju in South Korea. She is interested in many fields, wanting to explore and inquire deeply about them and express them artistically. Also, She always tries to convey a particular message to...

Edie Noesser

  Edie Noesser is an artist based in Orange County, California working in the medium of photography. Her work explores themes of nature, urban scenes and contemporary culture. This series of photos was taken in Downtown, Santa Ana, California where Edie was...

Yeobin Park

  Yeobin Park, a BC Collegiate sophomore and Vice-President of BCC Point of View, debuted her film "Unfinished Dream," showcasing her skills in directing, filming, and editing with Adobe Premiere Pro and Davinci Resolve. She aims to create films with bold...

Nicholas Mayo

  Nicholas B. Mayo (he/him) is a poet and artist based in Philadelphia, PA. His poetry has been published by Down in the Dirt Magazine and is forthcoming from Abstract: Contemporary Expressions. His paintings have been exhibited at Swarthmore College and Texas...

Ian Wells

  Ian Wells is a graduate researcher at the Washington State University HYPER Lab studying Mechanical Engineering. He focuses on optical and EM systems with experience in aerospace, thermal, and nuclear analysis. He hopes to continue contributing to aerospace...

Martha Nance

  Martha Nance is a physician in Minnesota whose cellphone has a wandering eye, which gets rewarded mostly when she is not in Minnesota.

Kathryn Jordan

  Kathryn holds an English M.A. from UC Berkeley. Her poems have twice won Honorable Mention in the Steve Kowit Poetry Prize and the Patricia Dobler Poetry Award, and have twice garnered Special Merit for the Muriel Craft Bailey Poetry Prize. Her work appears in...

John M. Blodgett

John M. Blodgett is an editor, reporter, and photojournalist based in Southern Maine. He most recently was an editor at The Boulder Monitor in Boulder, Montana, and has staffed on or contributed to publications that include The Western News, The Press-Enterprise, The...

Larena Nellies-Ortiz

  Larena Nellies-Ortiz is a freelance photographer from Oakland, California. Her photos have been featured in Sun Magazine, Barren Magazine, Indianapolis Review, Burningword Literary Journal, Local Wolves Magazine, Stonecoast Review, and 3Elements Review. She...

Teresa Hyoju Chang

  Teresa Hyoju Chang is a South Korean artist who was born with a love for art, reading, and writing from an early age. Currently a student at Seoul International School, she takes a particular interest in the subjects of history and Spanish, and also...

Roger Camp

Roger Camp is the author of three photography books, including the award-winning Butterflies in Flight, Thames & Hudson, 2002 and Heat, Charta, Milano, 2008. His work has appeared in numerous journals, including The New England Review, Witness, and the New York...

Seo Jin Ahn

  Seojin Ahn Is a Junior attending Chadwick International School in Songdo, Incheon, South Korea. His art practice is to create photo-based images. He developed and harnessed his skills in photography and the utilization of tools such as Illustrator and...

Stephen Curtis Wilson

  Wilson was a medical-surgical, and generalist photographer, writer, and communication specialist in the health care and library science fields for 36 years - cut steel in a foundry and drove a truck for a time. He is a graduate of the University of Illinois, a...

Steve Zimmerman

Steve Zimmerman Steve Zimmerman is a writer and photographer based in the Pacific Northwest. His work has appeared in the Evansville Review, Target Gallery, the Tacoma Art Museum, as well as many online publications. More of his images can be found at...

Somewhere in the Midst of Me, a Twig Snapped

I am okay with being monstrous, I know how you view me when I step out with three heads, I know the many ways you think of me. The day folds up into a tiny square which I put into my middle mouth, underneath its tongue. Watch the neck twitch. I am many things but easy...

The Albatross of Liquid Despair

hovers over your coiffed head, cawing in protest at the abominable stench rising, tears in its eyes, close to regurgitating its hard-sought lunch. Coleridge. Coleridge. Coleridge, you dotard. Have you no pity? No mercy? Must you pollute the earth’s air with poetry,...

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...

Featured Author, Jane Hammons

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 ReviewHint 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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Print & Digital Issues

Burningword Literary Journal Issue 118 Cover Image
Featuring: Issue 118, published April 2026, features works of poetry, flash fiction, short nonfiction, and visual art by Carston Anderson, Jack Bordnick Studio, Kenneth Boyd, Brian Builta, Robin Carstensen, Max Cavitch, Suhjin Chey, Lucinda Cummings, Jason Davidson, Greg Freed, Sharon Goldberg, Dara Goodale, Jane Hammons, Caroline Hayduk, Ken Holland, Dylan Hong, Michael Hower, Greta Kaluževičiūtė, Brian Kim, Minjae Kim, Matt Leibel, Scott Nadelson, Rina Park, Scott Penney, Michael C. Roberts, Jim Ross, R James Sennett Jr, Mia Sitterson, Dawson Steeber, Travis Stephens, Daniel Thompson, Josje Weusten, and M. Brooke Wiese.
48 Pages, 6 x 9 in / 152 x 229 mm, Premium Color, 80# White — Coated, Perfect Bound, Glossy Cover
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