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 Hybrid for Side A: “Like the Air Is a Needle” by Kate Catinella

So the kids turn it into some sort of game with a lot of screaming. “How many balloons did you” POP AHHHHHHH “Did you say you bought again?” “Fifty, but it was a deal where you” POP AHHHHHHH “Let’s just say” POP AHHHHHHH “Let’s just say there was a lot for the taking. Had to…
New Side A Short Story: “Nobody Cares” by Jacob Austin

Finding himself with a rare Tuesday off, Laramie decides to catch a movie. He had been told the local theater offered five-dollar matinees on Tuesdays, and while there is not anything playing he particularly wants to see, he had been at Target the other night and smelled the popcorn from the snack stand and has…
Side A Short Story: “My Oncologist” by Trevor J. Houser

My Oncologist After being told I had a year to live, I decided one evening to visit my oncologist’s private residence in Pacific Heights. It is a very nice neighborhood. Homes like state capitol buildings clad in armor of Italian cypress. When I arrived at my oncologist’s address, a stream of people in costume was…
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…