Category: The Last Word

“Lurking,” a short story by Tam Nguyen

For P.A, C*, J, P, D, and friends The campus’ hallway remained silent since the university’s closure earlier this year. Education was halted after the coup took over. As soon as different parts of the country slowly turned into battlefields, faculties and students got together and constituted a union, partially to create a self-didactic community,…
“the silence feat. uranus, neptune,” a poem by Michael Russell

in the new dubfor season 3 of sailor moon, the outer guardiansuranus & neptune are lovers who came from the coldestpocket in space, the unstitched hem of our galaxy.their mission: to burn through the silenceglaive pressed against the thin cherry blossomof a human throat. their throats, maybe—ours? boyfriend, on a crowded street how many planets…
Four Poems by Joel Anthony Harris

Prince Varmint Stops a Viking Siege I’ll never forget the Bastille Day, how it stormed the countrytown like a kettle of vultures. Yeomen toiled in fallow fields hacking the soil with their harrows.From the north hailed a drab dragonship that fiddled the still moat.There he was the wretched sprite, the scoundrel: Sam the Terrible!His eyes were…
Excerpt from SCARLET: Three Glitched Still Lives by Francesco Levato

*Ed.’s Note: click images to view larger sizes. SCARLET is a digital visual/poetic meditation on the fractured state of psyche induced by extended social isolation under COVID-19 lockdown. The digital/visual poems are created through erasure of the novel The Scarlet Plague collaged with glitched imagery from everyday life in lockdown. The titles of poems in…
“Cordyceps,” a flash essay by Sher Ting

Did you know cordyceps colonizes the bodies of carpenter ants, chemically hypnotizing them to ascend to the highest point in the environment before releasing a mushroom cloud of spores? I have been told a hundred useless facts, with bread and a butter knife on the train to Oslo. The man next to me, knotted in…
“Floating Lessons,” a love poem by Levi Cain

i love you atlantic oceani love you dog beach in februaryyour hair swirling in the wind all perfumei love you arboretum in all seasonsi love you defiant sprout of armpit hairi love you half-smothered squawk at dirty jokes,your eyes like two galaxies backflipping into a black hole full of molassesi love you kiss the size of an…
Three Poems by Estelle Bajou

Some of Us Are Born Some of us give birth to ourselvesOn the edge of the reservoirWhere you can hear the ice meltI was looking at the mountain behind your faceThinking of you crunching through miles of quiet trees,Thinking of the world without me, forWho has not sat terrified before the heart’s curtainSaying don’t you…
Flash Fiction: “Going In” by Kim Farleigh

“I was able,” James said, “to ignore it until yesterday; but last night, it was just impossible.” Sitting on his bed’s edge, he shook his head. I was lying on another bed, my head on a pillow, his head slowly shaking. A ceiling light turned our room’s window black. A vehicle’s drone outside rose then…
“My Mother Has Many Tricks”: Flash Fiction by Sacha John Bissonnette

In one of Grandma’s stories, she found my mother in the backyard, middle of the night, a blood-soaked possum neatly wrapped around her arm, like she had killed one before. She refused to let it go, letting out a feral shriek as Grandma got closer. My mother only dropped the possum when Grandma could reach…