Category: Print Archives

Three Poems by Joshua Butts

Measley Ridge Road Moving with the weather is no optionfor those on Measley Ridge. No vessels are preppedfor when the Brazos sweeten. Shirley Hughes, send your laundry waterto the nearest stream. Ziplocs huddle the deathsof the holiest white poor with their ragged white meatand dry bushels requiring so many creamed sides.If this were Louisiana one…
“Cartesian Ghost Story,” an essay by Jeff Chon

I should avoid the old neighborhood, but I have nowhere else to be right now. It’s five seventeen p.m.—the day care closes at six—and the kids hate it when I pick them up early, when they have to say good-bye to their friends. Whether I like it or not, I have some time to kill,…
Fiction: “The Drip Drop” by Rita Bullwinkel

Behind Gosling’s house there is a giant black ball of goop that hovers above the ground. It drops on his cat and creates puddles that we have to sweep away in the winter so they don’t freeze. When Gosling goes on vacation and the backyard is left unattended leaves blow under the ball and mix…
Two Poems by Zach Mueller

Broke Bottles, Gold Models There’s no sign sayingchoke saltwaterdrowning, but that’show it happens—the absenceof a sign. The thingis what it is.Let’s be honest.You should gulp it like strangers eye-fuckinga bank teller.See how honestlyour throats reject quartzand feldspar as thoughwe abominateislandswith our lips. Don’t encourage.Don’t hang it up on a fishhook.These ghost crabsfear flashlightsbecause sunlight is…
“The Last Bullet,” a comic by Andrew Bourelle & Edward Bourelle

*Ed.’s Note: click images to view larger sizes. Andrew Bourelle is the author of the novel Heavy Metal. His short stories have been published widely in literary magazines and fiction anthologies including The Best American Mystery Stories. Edward Bourelle has worked more than twenty years in commercial art as a graphic designer, illustrator, cartographer, and art director. Currently he is…
Fiction-screenplay Hybrid: “Game in the Sand” by Joe Sacksteder

GAME IN THE SAND They have finished securing Karl to the hood of the Chevy using the collected belts of everyone involved in production. Karl is unsure of many things. If his reflection will be visible in the windshield. If it will be obvious how slowly they’re driving the truck. If he can slip through…
“An Instrument,” fiction by Luke Wiget

It doesn’t matter anymore because organ music has gone the way of, well, organ music. But I remember when I was a kid someone stole the pipes to the Presbyterian Church’s organ to sell as scrap metal. There were two men. Both were wearing coveralls so the church secretary trusted them. The workmen told her…
“The Inner Eye Tattooed,” a poem by Marc Vincenz

(1) Looking in like a snail, my nose crawls against glass. How the view alters up close and the breath a mountainous fog against matter’s impermeable will. Isn’t this the color of pure silence— that rainbowed tint when night swallows reflections? (2) In the nothingness of the primordial, words written before words are known and…
“Christopher Ke’alohapauole Akana: A Life,” fiction by Jonathan Callahan

When I first set out to write the Life, I was twenty-six years old, my subject at the time therefore just approaching the twenty-seventh anniversary of his expulsion from the womb. Yet nearly four fruitless years had passed by the time I intend to revisit in these notes; I was now twenty-nine, and had arrived…