Category: Print Archives

From Vol. 9: “Creature and the Once-a-Year-House,” a poem by Michael Sikkema

9 shotgun barrels are wrapped around a beech tree, hunting party nowhere in site, one truck engine still running, almost out of gas 7 deer walk backwards out of pines as their seams split to mist Creature figures tiny wolves inside their head leak black milk, sniffs out blood on a salt lick Coming home…
From Vol. 9: “Shame (A Spell to Forget),” poetry by Charlotte Covey

This is a darker magic.This is crawling through his door at four a.m. and begginghim to take a bite. This is slipping between lucid and not, hoping he will finishme off. Somewhere, idly, I am thinkingI don’t even like him. Somewhere, not here, that matters. Somewhere, you arefalling asleep soundly, while he is taking offmy…
From Vol. 9: “Statement of Purpose,” a poem by Nicholas Bon

It’s important for you to know that I’m a fucking mess, that so often the drummer in the corner is too loud for this polite conversation. There are people, even now, asking me what I can bring to the feast. I left my hands at home & can’t get my shit together. How…
From Vol. 9: “Invasion of the Dad,” fiction by Nicholas Grider

The dad arrived, as dads are known to do, in a large red SUV that was partly covered in mud and made a confident exit from the vehicle, stepping down from the driver’s seat onto the blacktop in dark brown shoes dwelling somewhere between “sensible” and “noticeably expensive,” and the dad was dressed as if…
From Vol. 9: “Dear Editor Who Sent Me a Rejection Letter on Christmas, or Essay That Ends in a Fugue” by Sean Thomas Dougherty

At first I was like for real, man. Really? But then I immediately thought of my coworker Wayne, whose wife died a few years ago near Christmas, and what dismal days the holidays are for him, each colored light blinking on every house a stop light for this life, a demarcation, a calling back to…
From Vol. 9: “A Miniature Tale of Motherhood,” a short story by Oliver Zarandi

My children are cruel and look like goblins. Every day they take something away from me and I don’t ask for anything in return. I asked them this morning, “What do you want for lunch?” “Your breasts,” they said. So they had them. They suckled my teats, one apiece, and sucked them dry. No more…
From Vol. 9: Four Poems by Emily Blair

An IUD Is a Silver Bullet That Could Kill Me so I’m not taking recommendations at this time.Instead this body is as this body doessmoke sometimes. I quit and quit quitting. In the dark of a power outage,I live alone and lie awake in the silence of a thousand people panickinginside our little homes, 5…
Two Poems from The Future: Jessica Morey-Collins

The Day We Learned Most of us immediately pulled off our shoes and popped our shirt-buttons, released the thunder of our hearts to quarrel with the administration. The teenagers who found it had been up to teenage no-good—pushing each other in a stolen shopping cart, gulping begged beer and whooping through the sidewalked night. They…
Three Poems from The Future: Caely McHale

Mona Lisa My hands are the last human thing about me.I keep my fingernails pink.I arrange them soft like the Mona Lisa. I imagine delivering a baby, scaled and cold.Scoop the mucus from his throat!My hands are the last human thing about me. My brother’s hands have gone to shit,Dark and spotted from a magnified…