Dara Goodale

April 2026 | nonfiction

Relief Valve

It’s February and the power company is working on our building’s main heating line. We sit in our living room with big sweaters and pants and socks and sip tea, watching our breaths merge with the steam until we can’t tell which is which. Maybe it doesn’t matter—we’re all burning inside, anyways, while oxygen slowly combusts in our lungs. Sometimes I hear it crackle if the room is silent, but that’s only at 2am, when the metro stops running and the highway quiets. When all the people get to wherever they’re going. To wherever home is. I think people are always trying to get home however they can, the businessmen on the train and the junkies in the street, we’re all the same. We all take whatever bus comes first.

We live on the top floor of an 80-year-old apartment building. I didn’t know this before, but in old apartments, when they do work on the central heating, air pressure builds up at the tops of the pipes. They have to let it out with a tiny key that they twist into the gut of our radiator until water spurts like they hit an artery. I hover in the hallway while they clean up the mess and wonder whether I should ask them if they want something to drink. I’m not quick enough—they nod and head out, and then we have heat again. At least for a while. I’ve been finding comfort in things like these since you left: awkward interactions with handymen, not having heat, having heat again. Sometimes I’ll even smoke with the window wide open—but that’s nothing new, you’d say.

We turn the heat all the way up and finish our tea and sweat through our sweaters. The radiator burns if you touch it with the fleshy part of your palm, like I did to see if it was on. To check that they hadn’t only pretended to fix something that couldn’t be fixed. These aren’t metaphors—I think life just has a funny way of sticking the same thing under your nose over and over again, as if to say “look, this is what I meant.” I keep telling life “I understood you the first time,” but it’s no use. Life is busy going home and I’m getting older and you’re still dead. It’s too hot in our apartment. But listen: outside, it’s starting to snow.

 

Dara Goodale

Dara Goodale (they/them) is a Romanian-American queer multigenre writer and university student living in Lausanne, Switzerland. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Hayden’s Ferry Review, the American Poetry Journal, ANMLY, Cleaver Magazine, Thimble Literary Magazine, Sky Island Journal, and more. Dara is a Pushcart nominee and was a finalist for the Gasher Press 2025 Bennett Nieberg Transpoetic Broadside Prize. You can find them on Instagram @daragoodale and online at daragoodale.com

Greg Freed

April 2026 | fiction

Referred Pain

The fair thing is to tell the ending. He finishes talking. His expression is that of a man who has thrown a bomb and wants to see what happens, but worries he’s miscalculated the blast radius.

How glamorous it might be to throw a drink in his face, though it is the wrong shape of drink for making a point, according to the movies. I try to recall what legally constitutes assault.

What comes to mind instead is a Russian short story I read thirty years ago where the protagonist says, after being let down rough: I stood there, spit upon.  I do not in any case throw the drink.

One thing he had liked about me was that I had read (as he put it) “The Russians.” One thing he hated, come to learn, was that I made too many references. We are struggling to reconcile these, my drink and I.

“Well,” I say, not conscious of choosing a last word, a conduit to something impotent. Or perhaps “welp” which is one of only three examples in English of this final “p” that changes a word from a statement into an abdication.

A fair observer could only note the dignity with which I  rise then and walk out of the joint like any spurned heroine, now instead a hero, in a doorstop Russian novel that takes place, god knows why, in Texas.

So that’s the last reel. What comes before is the same as any history of amorous imbalance.

 

Greg Freed

Greg Freed is a psychotherapist living in Austin, Texas. His most recent publication, “Vita Nuova,” in Susurrus Magazine was nominated for this year’s Best Small Fictions. After years of writing utilitarian prose and the occasional opera review, Greg has published flash pieces in Screen Door Review and Libre.

Brian Builta

April 2026 | poetry

Antlers Reflected in Water

 

I wake with that fear again,

leaping then hindquarter stung.

I’m out and I’m fake.

 

How am I in charge of myself?

I’m wasted opportunity,

a bug lit for only a second.

 

I hiccup madly, remove the dart,

resume my unfounded fear of the future,

the usual abracadabra routine.

 

Should’ve stopped for that hit cat,

should’ve penetrated more deeply

as I swam those laps.

 

Instead, a still life: Darkness

with Eyes Closed, the haunting feeling

I’m the one who hit the cat.

 

Brian Builta

Brian Builta is a graduate of the University of Texas and lives in Arlington, Texas. His poetry has been published most recently in Ploughshares, Beatnik Cowboy, and Sugar House Review. He is the author of three collections of poems, and more of his poetry can be found at brianbuilta.com.