July 2021 | poetry
you go bats
in bone dry
dry flood
of night light
night night
there’s no need
now now
to be so shy
come and feed
the banquet
in the tower
the table set
w/ black flowers
(the pollen
is rust)
& great eggs
cracked open
a silver plate
and bowls of blood
raise the ghosts
from holes
i cut in the floor
holes i cut
with a sword
more more
Steven Turrill
Steven Turrill is the author of five books of poetry and the editor of Pine Peak Press. He lives in Los Angeles, CA. You can find him on Instagram and Twitter @turrillsteven.
July 2021 | fiction
Noriko sits on her knees in a gold and black kimono, wide sleeves holding fragile arms, palms on her lap, thumbs hidden. With white hair pulled back, cheekbones rise under eyes deep in memory of Manzanar. In Block 25, she lived with her mother and father next to an ancient apple orchard he pruned and tended, picking yellow fruit and storing baskets in a cellar the other men built for the skin to turn red and sweet. Being the oldest Issei man, younger than his daughter is today, he was given no work, left to himself while his wife made rounds as a dietician, using rations to plan menus for those suffering illness, and Noriko learned how to diagram English sentences, sticking words on limbs. The Sierras ten thousand feet above, her father hiked the creeks, no one believing an old man could escape the wire. He brought home branches of myrtle. Noriko would watch him sit for hours, carving boughs into lamps and table legs. Once a night heron emerged from his hands, short neck and short legs. Her father placed him at the edge of the steps. Alone to wait for the rising moon.
Chella Courington
Chella Courington (she/they) is a writer and teacher whose poetry and fiction appear in numerous anthologies and journals including SmokeLong Quarterly, X-R-A-Y Magazine, and New World Writing. With three chapbooks of flash fiction and six of poetry, she recently published a novella-in-flash, Adele and Tom: The Portrait of a Marriage (Breaking Rules Publishing), featured at Vancouver Flash Fiction. A Pushcart, Best Small Fictions, and Best of the Net Nominee, Courington now lives in California.
July 2021 | poetry
In the interest of time mothers move
stepwise and as for her a lingering in Mexico City
we lost touch some time ago, my mother reflects moodily. it is a
Monday afternoon and my world’s gone positively Popsicular
the grass was this euphoric entanglement of judgment
as I a king sat in the soft grass
And someone brought me watermelon sliced into precise little cubes
and everything felt round.
well that’s one version of it she says evenly
In some panhandle cabin the moon but a rakish visitor
stopping by for cookies. Her mother commanded her at the sink,
stop howling but she hunting for interpretive freedom
Splintered the task. Brought old light to new deeds in calling
attention to the weariness of form, a realization
which frankly undid me. And her taking a ticket to
The reeds of some unknown city where love was.
Caroline Fernelius
Caroline Fernelius is a writer from Texas. Her work has appeared in Storyscape Journal, The Decadent Review, Faultline Journal of Arts and Letters, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets College Poetry Prize. She currently lives in Ann Arbor, where she is a doctoral candidate in English.
