Year: 2019

Ashley Garris on This Hasn’t Been a Very Magical Journey So Far, a novel by Homeless

What are you supposed to do when Sid, an orange cat wearing a leather jacket, knocks on your door significantly later than he was supposed to? Well, if you’re trying to find your recently deceased lover, then you go on a journey with Sid, naturally. This Hasn’t Been a Very Magical Journey So Far by…
Aby Kaupang Poetry: Selections from 13 Words

In the month following Donald Trump’s election to President of the United States, the Southern Poverty Law Center received over 1,094 reports of hate crimes. A burst of hate. The following poems were written with the assistance of the Hate on Display database through the Anti-defamation League’s website and in-part for the Holter Museum of…
James R. Gapinski: “The Fourth Attic,” new fiction for Haunted Passages

We buy an old house in some up-and-coming Portland neighborhood (see: gentrification; also see: we are the problem, not the solution; also see: housing injustice). Somebody has left old boxes in the attic (see: 50% of all horror movies). The boxes are empty, but oddly enough they feel full. They weigh upwards of thirty or…
Haunted Passages: “eraser,” new poetry by Tariq Shah

They erased me yesterday.After they took up the gavel, hammered the sound block, the wheels setinto motion.They assembled their people into teams.Notary publics, solicitors general, coders, flame throwers, telephoneand wrecking ball operators.It was quite early the morning they commenced.A sky still the blue pink of gloveless winter hands.Quite quiet.I don’t know what to do.The new…
Three Prose Poems by Grant Kittrell

There’s a Man with a Hemingway Inside His chair is shrinking beneath him on the coffee shop patio. I should grow a mustache, a full-blown beard. This brisk November means nothing and everything to his smoky sail of hair. He runs his fingers through it like a god. His wife hasn’t said a word since…
Fiction: “Help Find Frankie Doolan” by Jack Kaulfus

1. Frankie switched her phone to silent and threw it on top of the travel duffel her father had given her for graduation five years ago. While she zipped her coat, she paused for a quick look in the mirror hanging over her childhood bed. That’s not my face, she thought. It was Thanksgiving…
Meiko Ko on Gillian Cummings’ The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter

Shakespeare’s Ophelia is an evocative figure of suffering, of men’s betrayal of women, as especially expressed within court patriarchy. The famed play finds her crushed by the cruelty and self-interests of her father, her brother, Hamlet, and Hamlet’s mother. She could have fought. She did not. Circumstances and times preventing her, she could only choose…
Shelf Life of Happiness, short stories by Virginia Pye, reviewed by Charles Duffie

In “Best Man,” the opening story from Virginia Pye’s new collection, Keith flies to Reno to attend Don’s wedding. Don is Keith’s best friend, as gay as Keith is straight, living with AIDS, and marrying a woman. That last fact confuses Keith, but soon all his expectations are unboxed: Don is near death, the wedding…
“Nowhere to Go from Here”: Rick Henry Chats with Micah Perks

Micah Perks’ latest collection of threaded short stories, True Love and Other Dreams of Miraculous Escape, was published this past fall by Outpost19 to some critical acclaim. She grew up in the eastern Adirondacks and in Vermont, and has the relatively rare experiences of living on a commune in her early years, as well as…