Category: Print Archives

Jacqueline Boucher Poetry: “Radioactive”

In the aftermath, the first things to grow are the horns. We fleshy ibex in threadbare sweaters clash in subcutaneous bump and grind, in hemorrhage & broken bone. I leave one eye at the foot of a gutted soda fountain, tin of ravioli clutched in my fist like pennies. Before: we got gas there, swapped…
Five Antarctica Poems by Dennis James Sweeney

70°5’S 65°40′E In the Antarctic Circle, our main concern is self-husbandry. Cutting dark chops from the dark sky. Identifying lifelong manacles. Feeling for the key. Suspending paper katydids from the ceiling at just the right angle: the difference between Hank’s breath and the hot, light breeze of the radiator. They trigger different flights. At times…
Kami Westhoff Fiction: “Until We Surface”

The quease in our bellies rises and recedes with the water’s insistent motion. We close our eyes, beat back the bile with an onslaught of swallow. For Andrew it’s worse, of course. He opens the kitchen window and vomits. His mother is a pinprick for now, but her motion snags the sky, tears it into…
Two Poems by C.M. Keehl

an act of desperation we have all done this kind of thing so I’ll send a postcard because light is tricky only being measured in meeting of crests I was here oncewhere the moon crests the pines to light a pool I sat in summer heat if you play your cards right I’ll give you…
Fiction: “A Crushing Beauty” by Kelly Lynn Thomas

Mia has been dead for weeks, but she can’t bring herself to leave Nowhere, Pennsylvania. When it had become clear that the chemicals she’d poisoned herself with had only worked on her body, she’d planned to make for Los Angeles like she and her best friend had always dreamed. She makes it as far west…
A Short Story by Laura Hendrix Ezell: “Flight,” from A Record of Our Debts

The pain in childbirth was different for Rachel. When it was her time, she felt it in every part of her, as if the baby were forming just as she birthed it, tearing its muscles away from her own, drawing blood from her veins and breath from her lungs. It was, for Rachel, a splitting,…
Tina May Hall: Two Fictions from The Extinction Museum

Exhibit #408 from The Extinction Museum—Bisected baseball with cork center, two layers of beige yarn, white horsehide cover stained with dirt and grass, black and red stitching, unraveling Grandmother said a baseball of her youth had a sturgeon eye at the center. Spiny fish, nearly prehistoric, giants they wrestled in the mud rivers that bracketed…
Brad Rose: Two Poems

In Media Res Everything on this planet fails fails in the middle even death your life is death’s failure but it’s not too late you can rescue death you can go to death’s school, learn death’s lessons don’t worry study look, already you are between floors, a mezzanine you’re almost nothing inside you, there is…
Ryan Bollenbach: Two Poems

sometimes the word for tender isn’t tender there is a knife in the dishrack, sharp, facing the open kitchen. i take the blade in my palm. a hawk claws inside a river. i feel buzzing in the wetness of skin, a bright lamp near death. wrap a clean body in a blanket, tuck fibers into…