Category: Issue 21

AWAKE UNTIL DAWN by Pete Prokesch

After my brother Max’s funeral, everyone was invited to the Wolinski’s backyard for a barbeque. I stood next to the margarita pitchers and watched ice cubes melt away in the summer sun. I felt a hand on my shoulder every few minutes. I mastered my routine. I turned, delivered my best grimaced smile and hugged…
DON’T CALL ME YOUR PRINCESS by Megan Culhane Galbraith

Once upon a time, there was a young girl who lost her mother too soon. Cinderella’s grief was bottomless. Every day she visited her mother’s grave. “Where is my great love?” she asked. One day her mother answered. “Cinder, dear, your great love is inside you. You must be yourself, for it is only then…
EGG WISHES by Lucy Zhang

At the claw grabber machine, we take turns snatching second chances. The chances are stacked in rows: dyed and hollowed eggs, their pointed ends tilted like defective roly-poly toys. There’s no strategy; we’ll take any of the eggs so long as they end up in one piece, plucked by the claw, dropped down the chute,…
LOVE AND LEAVING IN THE CONDITIONAL by K-Yu Liu

It’s not like crucial information wasn’t revealed in the early stages. Lars and I, we met under the context of illicitness. My boyfriend’s name was Léo. Tell him you have a boyfriend, tell him, I said to myself. “My boyfriend is also an engineer,” I announced in an attempt to ensure that my initial attraction…
TWO POEMS by Hussain Ahmed

COSMOLOGY OF THE CLOUD WITH BABA AS THE RAIN MAKER I. The sky is a rolag, carded with grief and dew. We were made in the image of our dead – because God relies on recycling to keep the earth going around the sun. II.…
COME CORRECT by Erika Meitner & Traci Brimhall

If my lips are zipped—if I keep our delicious and contagious secret—if I am amnesiac or too hungover to remember your mouth on mine—if I forget the imprint of your body indelibly stamped—if I search for you, call for you, lover, stranger, alien—if I offer up gratitude to the air—if I rob you of…
ANOTHER OHIO ROAD TRIP by Erika Meitner

First there were the Ten Commandments as tablets painted beneath One Nation Under God on the side of a semi container beached on the median Then there were the faded billboards for Southern Xposure Gentleman’s Club and Jesus above it as if his body on a cross could cancel out all that glorious &…
WHEN SUN SHINES ON WATER by Stella Lei

Claire goes pearl diving / in a swimming pool. Chlorinated and cold, / belly-down like a whale died / wrong. Claire is pallid, is sinking, / is alone, alone, alone. / Claire is halfway to drowned. Seeing through a haze / of blue, pickling her senses and watching the world / come apart. Cracks…
GYM CRUSH by Josh Tvrdy

High-slit shorty short-shorts with a neon streak— smooth scapulas the size of dinner-plates— …
ISSUE 21

Rebecca Macijeski Rodney Terich Leonard David Roderick Sarina Romero Amorak Huey Augusta Funk Irène MathieuJosh Tvrdy Stella Lei Erika Meitner Traci Brimhall Hussain Ahmed Kimberly Liu Lucy Zhang Megan Culhane Galbraith Pete Prokesch
TWO POEMS by Irène Mathieu

wish you were here I want to try to tell youabout how lucid the waterwas that day, how purposefulthe sun, how the windsnapped a linen sheet open-mouthed as a sail overthe railing at the end ofthe pier – I wrote, wish you were here and meant…
TWO POEMS by Augusta Funk

COUNTING TREES The summer before you left the store of wingbeats at dusk finally broke off. I reached for the shadow between the fence and the housenot caring if I looked plastic in the long stretch of green. Once, measuring what was left of the earth’svertical fields, you almost called me lifelike. It was a poor…