Category: Hybrid

Essay Hybrid: “Gnome: Excerpts” by Robert Lunday

Kouroi step forward and their smiles are votive candles. How much is lived between the words? What we need to see hides in the blind spots. The more we close our eyes, the more our faces open. Contours ripple to a point of disappearance. Whites of the eyes enhance gaze signals. Eyebrows exaggerate expression. A…
Haunted Passages: “Sticking the Cow,” a lyrical prose piece by Stina French

My mother called penises “tallywackers.” That’s a name meant to scare a girl off ‘em. I wonder if that word came to mind when she was eighteen, when her uncle raped her. I didn’t understand, as someone who had never been raped, how it can make a woman run from her body forever, force her…
Claire Polders: “Amsterdam,” a hybrid fiction

Aerial shot. The sun rises over a city of semicircles. Traffic noises are punctuated by shrieking gulls. The camera pans down, getting closer and closer to the earth until figures emerge on a street split in half by a misted canal. I – EconomyNothing is permanent except for the creation of junk. Bicycles. Umbrellas. Handbags…
Anne Riesenberg: “The Leaves Will Protect Us,” a hybrid work

I am traveling through a country slowly catching on fire. Past towns simmering on dusty hillsides, bleached fields rattling in the sun. A girl walks towards me with a car balanced on top of her head—just the shell of it, no engine or wheels. The girl is swathed ankles to neck in a quilted jumpsuit.…
One-Act Play: “The Actuarials” by A.E. Weisgerber

Characters: Dr. Peng Ripshaw, The Incarcerator Dr. Vernon Stackpole, The Rehabilitator ※, The Regressor Scene: February 2028, Mindcast via The PubPol ClinX Roundtable, Cleveland Ohio, and Davos, Switzerland Ͷ Ͷ Ͷ (Screens flare and flicker) Ripshaw: A diagnosis is called for … Stackpole: Do you mean penal? perhaps remedial? PR: I mean machine-like. Simple computations,…
Five Strips from In Search of Basho, a haiku/comic mashup by Ross Findlay & Mark “Fittsy” Fittock

*Ed.’s Note: click images to view larger sizes. In Search of Basho is a haiku/comic mashup written by Ross Findlay and drawn by Mark ‘Fittsy’ Fittock. Both reside in Germany. The comic details the last year of the protagonist’s life as he goes on one final trip in search of the haiku master, Matsuo Basho.…
Three Hybrid Pieces: Marlin M. Jenkins

At Camp This Summer Hussein runs down the rocky hill behind the tennis court in flip flops (though he is not wearing socks with his flip flops as Mahmoud, his cousin, is—white ones with red lint clinging to the toes). Mahmoud: “Wallah I swear to God, Hussein, if you hit it out of bounds one…
Chris Holdaway: Excerpt from CODE: Equinox, a poetry hybrid

*Ed.’s Note: click images to view larger sizes. Chris Holdaway is a poet/editor/linguist from New Zealand, where he directs Compound Press (compoundpress.org). He is the author of HIGH-TENSION/FASHION (Greying Ghost, 2017), with recent work in Cream City Review, The Seattle Review, and elsewhere.
“Election Year,” a poetry comic by Catherine Bresner (published in the empty season)

*Ed.’s Note: click images to view larger sizes. Catherine Bresner’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Offing, Passages North, The Pinch, H_NGM_N, Cream City Review, Burntdistrict, Handsome, and elsewhere. She has been the coordinating editor for The Seattle Review, an intern at Wave Books, and is currently the managing editor for BOAAT Press.…