Gilbert Arzola

October 2026 | poetry

Quarters

at the elementary school for 25 cents a week

in 1959 they’d bring you a carton of milk every day at 2pm.

a mid-afternoon pick me up for twenty 2nd graders who sat dutifully at their

wooden desks between math and geography, taking the slow steps

to growing up. for a quarter a week every

afternoon gary, who died of aids fourteen years later wheeled a cart between five rows

and delivered the milk while scott, who became a carpenter because he

understood angles and how to measure things; marked off the

names in pencil with a crooked check mark and minded the names with

an X beside them who didn’t get milk because they hadn’t paid a quarter.

I kept my head down, pretending not to care. I cared, of course I cared.

but I had never paid, I never had a quarter. I was seven years old,

too young to have a quarter of my own.

And I didn’t want to ask. I knew no way to bring it up

to my father who sat worn thin as explanations every evening

smelling of black dirt and sweat.

with the eyes of a poor men, scooping frijoles from

cracked plates. there was never a sliver of opportunity for questions.

no room between bites for asking. I didn’t want to see

his face and how the sun would sink a little lower behind him

when he dug into his pockets and found them empty.

 

Gilbert Arzola

Winner of the 2019 Passager Poetry Contest and the 2021 Rattle Poetry Chapbook Contest, Gilbert Arzola has been nominated twice for Pushcart Awards. His book of poetry Prayers of Little Consequence was published in 2019 by Passager, and a chapbook, The Death of a Migrant Worker, was published in 2021 by Rattle. His work has appeared in Crosslimb, The Elysian Review, The Notre Dame Review, Palabra, The Tipton Review, Craft, Acentos Review, Two Cardinals, Flying Island, and Rattle, among others.

Esther Zhang

October 2026 | visual art

Kashgar – Esther Zhang

Esther Zhang is a junior at The Winsor School in Boston, Massachusetts. Her writing has been recognized by the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, The New York Times, and Longfellow House. Beyond writing, she enjoys experimenting with digital and film photography, and her photographic work has been featured as cover art in Blue Marble Review and published in New Plains Review.

S.E. Wilson

October 2026 | fiction

Potato Patch

The rocks were slick and he carefully made his way along them. He wasn’t as agile as he was as a child and he stepped with care. There was a light breeze and the sounds of chickadees and the steady whoosh of the water seemed to be all around him. That made him feel much younger than he was. He was looking for the pool where he used to fish as a boy with his father, when they camped here all those years ago. It was where the trout gathered to feed and to rest and where he caught his first fish. But he was worried that he went the wrong way. He couldn’t remember and that made him uneasy.

Then he saw it. It was calm and glistened like stained glass in the light. It was exactly how he remembered it being. He felt a deep relief.

His father had always told him to fish the head of the pool, the faster water, so that’s where he began, perched on a rock. The clouds moved over the sun and everything became dull. Then the clouds continued and the sun returned. The colors beamed like a movie.

He cast and put the worm near the entrance of the pool and allowed the current to take it. It felt good to hold the rod and watch the line leave the reel as it disappeared farther and deeper into the stream. But before the worm could make its escape, he dropped the bail, preventing the line from feeding too far into the water, hoping the worm would soon feed a fish.

It had been a long time.

As he waited, memories returned, not as scenes or photographs, or anything he could ever describe or even recollect, but as sensations too strong for a single moment. It was as if a lifetime forgotten had suddenly been remembered. There was a penetrating warmth to it. Then, when he began to bring the line in, slowly and with rhythm, flashes of his father came to him—him sitting on a rock in a wide-brimmed hat, his eye glasses wet and smudged with fingerprints; him in the glow of the campfire, smoking a cigarette, quiet and composed, watching the embers crack and pop. And his father drunk and crying in the kitchen in the middle of the night after everything went bad. He imagined the worm beneath the surface and hoped a fish followed close behind.

Cast after cast there was nothing. A limp, loose line returned every time. His broken reflection in the moving water. The sun moved and he moved with it. The shadows had turned and he thought about returning to camp, but he didn’t want to go back empty-handed, so he rebaited, stood, and cast.

As soon as the line hit the water there was a strike. It was violent and broke the surface. He snapped back and felt the setting of the hook. The feeling rushed through him like a drug. He pulled the fish from the water, its smooth green spotted skin and pink stripe shining in the sunlight. He used a rock on the fish. He slit its belly open, removing the insides and the little heart, which still beat, and threw everything back to the stream, then he rinsed the fish and placed it in the kill bag and made his way back to camp where his wife and one-year-old son were waiting around a warming fire.

 

S.E. Wilson

S.E. Wilson lives with his family in Franklin County, North Carolina. His work has been nominated for Best of the Net and has appeared in Chiron Review, The Berlin Literary Review, Louisiana Literature, Arkansas Review, The Louisville Review, New World Writing Quarterly, The Saturday Evening Post, and elsewhere.