Category: Side A

The rule: send ONE standalone poem, essay, story, comic, manifesto, anomaly to “Side A.” Published works appear alongside short-form interviews and, if possible, YouTube audio.

New Side A Prose Poetry: “A Meditation on Birds and Other Things After Watching It Was Just an Accident” by Sarah Dickenson Snyder

A Meditation on Birds and Other Things After Watching It Was Just an Accident I know very little about Iran, and yet there are familiar crow sounds in the beginning of the movie where cars dart on busy roads and one man digs a dusty grave in the desert. Nothing feels safe there. Crows squawk…
“Grief Algebra”: New Side A Flash Fiction by Mileva Anastasiadou

Grief Algebra We sit in silence around a table of four. We’re only three, because someone is missing. His chair is empty and will remain silent until someone visits and sits there, unaware of the value this chair held. We’ll look at them like they’re undefined operation, like they’re savage or sacrilegious and they won’t…
Poetry for Side A: “A Branch Where Things Went Terribly Wrong” by Salvatore Difalco

I am not a single person moving through a single story.I am a multiplicity, a sprawling bush of eventssprouting new branches. This version of me tooka left turn at the intersection. Another version tooka right turn. That version avoided the catastrophethat greeted this version shortly after makingthe ill-fated left turn. I had wanted to turn…
New Side A Essay from Raymond de Borja: “, I mistake things for other things,”

“Writing ethnography offers the author the opportunity to encounter the Other ‘safely,’ to find meaning in the chaos of lived experience through retrospectively ordering the past. It is a kind of Proustian quest in which the ethnographer seeks meaning in events whose significance was elusive while they were being lived. Dorrine Kindo, ‘Dissolution and Reconstitution…
Original Short Comic for Side A: “My Life” by Dominik Slusarczyk

Mini-interview with Dominik Slusarczyk HFR: Can you share a moment that has shaped you as a writer (or continues to)? DS: Early on in my writing career I wrote a poem called “Grey Fish Sea.” The poem is strange but beautiful. Every time I write I try to emulate what I did with that poem.…
Side A Flash Fiction by Keith Woodruff: “Thunderstorms 101”

Thunderstorms 101 That red alert dot on your weather app? That’s us. As a couple, we’re textbook toxic. Our bitter resentment and anger churning up the atmosphere. Expect torrents, damaging winds. Lightning, striking thrice times in some cases. We’ll pick our teeth with the wire bones of your Walmart umbrellas. We have a chemistry, but…
New Flash Fiction for Side A: “dangerous humans” by John Sara

dangerous humans The newspapers will remark on how he was born just before Christmas; December 24, the time doesn’t really matter. His mother, a Catholic, will visit a psychic for reassurance. The old woman will tell her only great men are born so close to Christ. She will take this as a sign of his…
Original Side A Flash Fiction: “Plugs” by Sudha Balagopal

Plugs Years ago, ahead of my work trip to London, you went to RadioShack to purchase the type G plugs needed in the U.K. “Must you insist on this much preparation?” I asked and you raised your brows. The plugs had three rectangular prongs, different from the ones we use in the States. “The Brits…
Side A: Two Poems by Peter Leight

Escapism in Pictures Lifting my headlike a passengerdrawing picturesin the airin front of me This one is a pictureof not being here In this one I’mopening the doorwith the tipof my tongueand walking out with my tonguein my hand Not even waitinguntil it’s timewhen is it time? Lifting my headand leaning into the air as…