Category: Issue 24

THE LEAST AMERICAN FACE by M. Y. Li

The event is in thirty minutes. You don’t really know what it is. The leader of your Erasmus group said something in Spanish about a trip to a traditional Moroccan venue. But did he say the place is a restaurant or a themed bar? Your Spanish isn’t great, but it’s good enough to make out…
MEMORY FIELDS by Liz Howey

The orchard is beautiful. Meets the postcard standard of picturesque, as promised. Lines of foliage haloed by the rising sun, shades of green and brown and golden red, and for a second Maggie slips, imagines her and Brendon and a child that won’t exist. A little girl—no, a boy, a little arrogant boy, a mini-Brendon.…
THE FAMILY STONE by Catherine Norris

There’s a boulder in the living room.It blocks the view of the tv, depending where you sit by which I mean, unless you sit on it or in front, which isn’t comfortable and renders the soft of the sofa impossible. Sometimes, when we sit on it, we can forget it’s there. We sit and laugh and lean into a fall or at least the sudden…
IN THE HALL OF THE MOUNTAIN KING by Majda Gama

My father came from a city of old rooftops sprawled across seven hills. Within these hills were tribal Gods carved into metamorphic rock. When he built us a home, that home was new & imported. Veined, marble tiles from Italy. Wood furniture from the hollows of North Carolina. He loved what was new, but filled…
ROAD TO BYBLOS by Madeleine Cravens

Mechanized time was an invention created to sustain entire empires. And love, I knew, could be expressed through an idiom about graves. We rode past the beachsidenightclub and threecement factories. I wasn’t in love. I never knew what time it was. Smoke unfurled from the airbase.A pregnant dog howledfrom under a fig tree.
TWO POEMS by Helena Mesa

Bozza Imperfetta of Sight The tourists arrive. Dogs roam, smaller than the strays back home, then sleep, teats exposed, on warm stone roads. The tourists snap pictures; they snap pictures of each other snapping pictures; as expected, they snap pictures of cars—a 1950s Ferrari, a red taxi with Rubenesque curves. Strangers wave, pose: A…
LOVE POEM WITH A MAGGOT INFESTATION by Janelle Tan

“For a person in love, the air looks no different.” – Jane Hirshfield may was the problem, not the trash we forgot about. they’re not gonna die with bleach,you say, flattening them with paper towels. maggots are crawling up the…
AFTERMATH by Robert Wood Lynn

It took years, what precise excavations of archeologists running low on funding—but we did it, worked through all of my books, hundreds even. Me, dogearing the good poems with little folds in the top corners and you with large ones at the bottom. Sometimes, though half as often as I’d expect, we marked the same page, the edges bending toward each…
WHOEVER IS NOT HOME GROWS SICK by David Keplinger and Bruce Bond

Whoever is not home grows sick. Maybe I am writing towards the cure of this insanity. Home me, I say to my friend. Go back, said the crowd as Lazarus emerged. Eat something, said the father when the prodigal walked in. Silence, said the word silence that…
TENDING GRIEF AT THE GREAT SALT LAKE, A RITUAL by Kathryn Knight Sonntag

Clouds unspool above light Departing. Salt makes diviners of gulls, Tiny archways of bones, pooling socketsLong emptied by sun’s fire. A circle Of strangers, we imbue our grief Into stick, feather, and stone. I long To be emptied, to not fear this cold, which is To not fear its memory. This lake is memory. The couple Next to me sees into the watery Expanse…
TWO POEMS by Meredith Nnoka

Zuihitsu at the Beginning of the End Dark now. This is what fits, and where. Here, take what I’m offering you: a twitch of the shoulder blade. My eyes traveling the ceiling fan. A train whistle in the night. Don’t stay. Ceaseless. Cicadas through the window, in the deep branches, punctuating the silence.…
A STORY ENDING WITH AN OFFERING by Willie Lin

No one wanted to do it, no one wantedto look at a thing so large, helplessto die or live, not knowing what to ask for itself.To imagine an after. Even less to change it.Because they all imagined themselvesgentle—no hunter, no wolf among them—theywanted it to return to where the crease of woods began. The woman, she…