Category: Print Archives

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…
“A Flag Unfit to Fly,” poetry by Tim Kahl

A Flag Unfit to Fly The flag stayed up way too long and no oneknew how to properly retire it. It had beenraised too quickly. The young men in cargo pantshad not seen the skit about flag etiquette.They faced the flag and held their breath,sensing a vague feeling within themselvesit should not hang in the…
Three Poems by Matthew Broaddus

It’s Good to Be Ashurnaspiral II The dunes part. Enter oasis. I emerge from the desert on my immaculate Bactrian, sipping an adult beverage from one of those neon crazy straws and tipping my hat to no one in particular. My pride of lions, cast in copper radiance by the god Ninagal, tails me and…
Two Poems by Vincent Poturica

The Unknowable A small German boy splashes inpuddles of radioactive measuredcalmness. The puddles are not,in fact, radioactive or measured. But these adjectives seem the mostappropriate signifiers in depicting thespecies of calmness the German boyfeels while splashing after waking too early from a troubled dreamstarring clowns without eyes or mouthsbut only brilliant red noses much largerthan…
Five Fictions by Matthew Beach

There She Is A woman in a pantsuit arrives first. She opens the lockbox and takes the key. She steps into the living room. The air washes over her, a wave of vinegar, astringent and thick. She draws back, brings her fingers to her nose, then crunches in heels over tattered carpet, calcified from encrusted…
Fiction from Our Colony Beyond the City of Ruins: “The Sea Captain’s Ghost” by Janalyn Guo

Entering the city of Boris from the sea, the Sea Captain’s Ghost notices a mollusk on the back of his neck and peels it off. The city is full of flower gardens. People from all over the world come to Boris for its flower gardens, he is told by a billboard. Flower trellis–covered towers jut…
Two Poems by Kyle Harvey

Glacier—for Danny Rosen and Jack Mueller We are the sea and we rise with the break offslide-in of ice,the direction easy over grease,the way melt path-slick. We have notany or much time. Or, hell,we may have forever. What will we do? Thesefinal and endless days, does it matter? Why do we expectmeaning to be profound?…
Two Poems by Jill Khoury

For Weeks I Have Been Waiting for Something Pleasant to Write About But to no avail, soI clipped some items from the daily paperWhen I come across these items I send them on It’s better than talking about the goddamn weatherI am a clipperI don’t keep at it too long It’s funny that there are…
Four Poems by Tony Mancus

All the Things Your Head Can Be your head is a pew, you drape its curve. your empty palm, pass the plate along with three dollars pulled from your pocket to stifle your candle-lit worry. the trace of a thought in one dream as it’s drawn across thresholds—your tiny form against a massive door, pressing,…