Category: Side A

Side A Poem: “Levelland” by Kirk Keen

Levelland we impose stark beauty potluck of words to shut your mouth realign velocities our open mouths bless your heart pull up a chair here for your smart phone cotton hoe social media whatever let’s explode the sun everyday cash in on methodist hands warbling poetics of hearing nothing my first day i hold my…
Side A Graphic Essay: “Fire” by Jesse Lee Kercheval

Mini-interview with Jesse Lee Kercheval HFR: Can you share a moment that has shaped you as a writer (or continues to)? JLK: My very first writing teacher—and a wonderful one—was Janet Burroway, who many people know from her textbook Writing Fiction. We met again, after I had finished my first novel, The Museum of Happiness,…
Side A Prose Poem: “Peonies” by Tiffany Troy

Peonies The chiaroscuro of my breasts hanging from my nightgown under the lamp light. His voice soothes as buds take root over my skin in droves. The buttons undone, I open the hem of the dress to my waist, as I take in the day’s sweat and decay. I detach parts of myself as he…
Side A Poem by YF Wang: “Love, There Is a Snake in Your Closet”

I think of you with tapeworms in my tummy, like Medusa had stuck her head through my vagina & at seventeen, Ella tells me she thinks she might be pregnant—“My mother is going to kill me”—she says over the bathroom sink, our skins tattooed by the mirror graffiti. A familiar tune rings out the Wellesley…
Side A Poetry: “It Might as Well Be” by Max Winter

It Might as Well Be Which is a stateIf the weather holdsAnd the wind arrives timelyIf it’s right it’s easyAs being hit by a carOr scooped from a litterHappiness for everybodyAnd a carbonated lime drinkWith a talking sailboatFinishing my sentencesAt moments you think for meLittle boatLittle squireI bequeath you everythingBut we’re not thereYet are weI…
New Side A Short Story: “In Cahoots” by Terese Svoboda

In Cahoots My son looked at his plate and looked at the dog and said he needed to go. I was still serving myself, my wrist flicking out sauce from a pot with a spoon. I sighed, placed my half-filled plate on the table, and took his hand in mine. After finding the key that…
Side A Poem: “To the First Twenty Years, Give or Take” by Anthony Robinson

To the First Twenty Years, Give or Take It was a childhood of chain link fences &a dozen kinds of rain an alluvial epochof brain & bone & polyhedral dicemuddy ditches & fir trees mailbox rows Dogs in single file. these words a surfeit of clinking changerender the past a cosmic vending machine primer gray…
New Poem for Side A: “Kandinsky” by Sandy Berrgian

Kandinsky I entered a dream worldof color and fireDay and nightgarden and fieldegg and dragonflyFlag and footballThis form a science fiction. Mini-interview with Sandy Berrgian by Rod Roland RR: What can you tell me about this poem? SB: Kandinsky is one of my most favorite artists. I was probably at the Guggenheim. I don’t know…
Short Fiction for Side A: “An Evening Jog by the Lake” by Stacey Lounsberry

An Evening Jog by the Lake A human man with the top of a taxidermized bison head, its breast of fur still fluffed like a winter scarf, pushes a baby stroller just ahead of me. Its wheels bump fist-sized rocks, jarring the carriage; the man’s knuckles flash white like a warning. He stops to watch…