Poetry by Kristen Gallagher 820 THE BEACH – HARE The image is as the title suggests: the beach. But also a person sitting on it, or possibly kneeling, facing the water, and also possibly covered in spores, or in the…
Fiction by David Driscoll CASKET SHOPPING Grandma died sitting up in her bed. It was the afternoon, and all four of us were there. We didn’t see her soul winging out of her mouth on a little puff of smoke…
Flash Nonfiction by Jacqueline Doyle FACEPLANT There was no time to think, just seconds as you fell, before your face hit the concrete with a sickening thud and so much force that you were sure you were dead or just…
Flash Nonfiction by Christopher Kostyn Passante INTERVENTION Let’s begin with your name. Thomas. Last name? Paine. Interesting. Why’s that interesting, doc? That you share a name with a famous revolutionary? It’s just a name my father gave me. I see.…
Poetry by Alan Pelaez Lopez DISASTER IS A POLITIC (Click on image to enlarge.) Alan Pelaez Lopez is a poet, installation, and adornment artist from Oaxaca, México. Pelaez Lopez’s debut visual poetry collection, Intergalactic Travels: poems from a fugitive alien…
Poetry by Beth Kephart LIGHTNING STRIKES Beth Kephart, a National Book Award finalist, is the award-winning author of some forty books and the author of the bestselling Substack, The Hush and the Howl. She turned to the paper arts…
Fiction by June Martin SHE’S STILL HERE? For as long as any of us had known her, Jennifer had carried herself with the dignity of someone who was going to die young. She knew it would happen soon, and everyone…
Flash Nonfiction by Ellen Winn HOW TO SAY GOODBYE TO YOUR DAD AND HELLO TO YOUR BABIES Go to your dad’s first oncology appointment when you’re eight months pregnant with your first child. It will be unclear who needs a…
Fiction by EJ Green AFTERPARTY I’m buying cigarettes and a scratch-off ticket at Wawa when the dog starts following me. I don’t know the dog, but the dog assumes it knows me, because it sticks its nose against my pocket…
Flash by Jamie Holland THIS IS WHO WE ARE Before we were ten, we served gin and tonics and poured Chablis into glass after glass, navigating the thick forest of dark suits and wide ties, color-blocked dresses and soft walls…
Flash Nonfiction by Debbie Weaver HOMER On a Sunday morning, I shuffle from the family room where I’m reading to the kitchen and pour a second cup of coffee, stepping over my oldest daughter’s ten-year-old dog who is suffering from…
Poetry by Jack Brummett I WORK AT A DOG KENNEL Jack Brummett graduated from Arcadia University with a degree in English, concentration in Creative Writing. He is a lifelong Philadelphia resident, and throughout his life has been a writer, artist,…
Poetry by Amy Beth Sisson PITH VISPO / PITH TRANSLATION (A CONTRAPUNTAL) Pith Vispo Pith Translation (A Contrapuntal) My estimable mother bequeathed her body to science Where she was anatomized in a medical school lab As a girl, I loved…
Creative Nonfiction by Amy Beth Sisson THE WHITE-WALLED OFFICE In my doctor’s office I stared at white walls decorated with diplomas. The room had two doors. I tried to decide if one was smaller than the other or if it…
Visual Narrative by Clifford Thompson CONNECTICUS DIGGS, Cultural Detective Episode 5: The Path Clifford Thompson’s books include What It Is: Race, Family, and One Thinking Black Man’s Blues and Big Man and the Little Men: A Graphic Novel. His newest book, Jazz June: A…
Flash by Laurie Blauner BATS The best I could manage was a high whistle while trying to tell the bats, Stay away. When they first arrived I wanted to speak to them but they were busy echolocating. At night, in…
Poetry by Alison Powell LIFE LOOP a. My mother dreams of Ninepenny, the sign marking it: her father’s land. A stream split down the middle by a crescent of mossy bank. She tells me about it, how they’d kept chickens.…
Flash by Karen Laws HOW PIGEONS WALK At the lake I remained alert, my gaze alighting upon every gray head. I watched anyone with a moderately stiff gait. I contemplated a grassy slope where people were sunbathing and thought, This…
Fiction by Tracy Morin AIR SUPPLY Love and Other Bruises I lived with a man, Barry, just before they enacted, after a lengthy period of contention in the usual government palaces, the Intercontinental Rationing of Oxygen Decree (IROD). Two days…
Poetry by G. Dylan Sessoms POEM ABOUT A PORTRAIT MY EX-WIFE HUNG IN THE KITCHEN, AND NOTHING ELSE G. Dylan Sessoms is a North Carolina native and southern poet. He is currently pursuing his MFA in Poetry at the University…
Flash Nonfiction by Brooke Middlebrook FIRST LESSON Us fourth-graders are sitting in a circle in the cafegymatorium awaiting our first flute lesson—all girls except poor AJ, no more saxophones left at the rental place—with instruments assembled in our laps, and…
Poetry by Warren C. Longmire HOUSE FLAG FOR FATHERS Warren C. Longmire is a poet, performer, and technologist from North Philadelphia. His work explores code, computation, and digital poetics as tools for reframing language, race, national identity, and power.…
Flash Nonfiction by Lauren Woods SPILLING OVER The time I drunk dialed my grandmother, I was twenty-three years old and just out of college. My sister and I had been drinking in our new apartment in Washington, DC, a small…
Creative Nonfiction by Sara Quinn Rivara STILL LIFE WITH WOMAN * My sisters and I covered our parents’ minivan in maxi pads as we drove through Ohio, a thin line of cigarette smoke easing from the open windows. Our parents…
Fiction by KSM GROUNDED It wasn’t possible that Gerard had written the note himself. First of all, he’d never spent much time in the Art Books section. And second, it wasn’t his handwriting. But when he pulled the book off…
Visual Poetry by Cindy HillUNTITLED MURAL, ACRYLIC ON FOUR VERTICAL METAL PANELS, 6′ x 8′, c. 1979 …we cover the universe with drawings we have lived.–Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space I. Bedroom Mural I stand on a rockpromontory looking…
Visual Narrative by Clifford Thompson CONNECTICUS DIGGS, Cultural Detective Episode 4: Letters Clifford Thompson’s books include What It Is: Race, Family, and One Thinking Black Man’s Blues and Big Man and the Little Men: A Graphic Novel. His newest book, Jazz June: A Self-Portrait…
Poetry by Robyn Schelenz INTELLIGENCE The developer seized the land during blue winter cold but Jacob’s cows didn’t know. They returned. The shepherd placed metal in his teeth; grass still grew for a thousand other mouths. When I climb the…
Poetry by Jim Stewart IN WHAT CITY DID YOUR PARENTS MEET? The Oyster Bar closed awhile in the pandemic. Before trips to Beacon I went by there with my son, whispered corner to corner in the hallway outside. My Dad…
Flash by Emily RinkemaMAYBE THIS IS WHAT THE END IS LIKE “We could eat the dog,” Sam says. He takes a piece of bread and mops up the sauce left on his plate. It’s his favorite, a roasted red pepper…
Flash by Claudia Monpere GHOST ROOFERS Their bid is high. But I sign. I’ve never worked with a ghost company before. And Ghost Roofers offers a special product; on scalding days their roofs spray cool mist through ceilings and walls.…
Fiction by N.D. Brown SUICIDES Mitchell moved into his mother’s double-wide in time to sign up for Freedom Run High School’s summer football program. The sprints were called “suicides,” and when seen from overhead, the football players’ movement along the…
Flash by Kevin Spaide LEMON CAKE The cat watches as you eat a piece of the lemon cake you bought this morning even though you know how to make lemon cake and have, in fact, made hundreds of them. At…
Flash by Bobby Crace NATIVITY The nativity scene between Denny’s and CVS is still up in February. A strip of grass has forced the characters into a straight line behind a Cabbage Patch Doll strapped to an Igloo cooler. Mary…
Flash Nonfiction by Preeti TalwaiBIRTHDAY PARTY The craziest thing about a C-section is that you don’t feel anything from the chest down, but you can still move and speak just fine. So you make small talk with the nurses who…
Poetry by Simon Parker CARAVAGGIO’S WOMEN In the queue for Caravaggio flesh is made marmoreal a woman in a white dress our baroque beacon who should guide us to a wedding feast where gods are drunk and fallen angels are…
Flash by Louella Lester THE DOCTOR SWEEPS IN On his way past the assistant’s desk he claws my folder from the counter, calls my name, hovers silently for a minute, then lands his oversized feathered feet in front of me,…
Visual Poetry by Elizabeth Johnston Ambrose MASH (A CENTO GAME FOR POETRY LOVERS) M— “The mansion of the sky, whose door is the morning mist, and whose windows are the songs and the silences of night”1 A— “An apartment….the hall…
Flash by Beth Gilstrap THREE MICROS from There Is News Along The Ohio River XII. There is news along the Ohio River: a boy, toddler drunk, walks ahead of his parents whose body language suggests distance, a slow dying of…
Visual Poetry by Katrina Roberts BOX OF AIR Katrina Roberts’s books of poems include Likeness (full-color); Underdog; Friendly Fire; The Quick; How Late Desire Looks; and Lace (chapbook); she’s editor of Because You Asked. Her visual/verbal work appears in publications such as BOMB, Ilanot Review,…
Poetry by Ivy Hoffman EVERYONE HAS CANCER Today at camp, the kids write Andrea Gibson quotes on paper and fold them into airplanes. One of the kids asks me how to spell cancer, waving his arms, a cloud in his…
Flash by Barbara Westwood Diehl FOUR MICROS Scavengers We end our marriage with burnt toast. We end our marriage with cold casserole. We end our marriage with undercooked meat. Untouched. Before, we buttered the toast and ate the blackened bread.…
Fiction by Terri Lewis LEAVING THE STAGE When night fell and lights dimmed, the dream of watching my last play gathered in the shadows and I’d begin to moan. My anguish wasn’t stage fright—that was for the actors—but for the…
Creative Nonfiction by Vivienne Germain FALSE COGNATES OF A REAL ILLNESS actuel ≠ actual En faisant confiance à ce qu’on pense qu’on sait à première vue, on acquiert une sensation de compréhension actuelle. Translation: By trusting what we think we…
Poetry by David John Rosenheim HOTEL RABBINICAL Whisper a benediction to the fly cupped in your palm and release it to the open pane it is grateful for the pale night under its wing A lamb on the slope…
Fiction by Marc Kaufman BRIDGES Rebekah Aronson’s bridge was next. It didn’t look like much, though several of us in class, the 7th graders that also knew her from Hebrew school, had our prints all over it. Fearing we hadn’t…
Fiction by Andrew V. Lorenzen OFF-SCRIPT Long before the fall, before the riots and the unrest, long before it all really began, I experienced a bout of insomnia while backpacking through Southern Asia and began to illegally phone bank voters…
Flash Nonfiction by Aurora Bonner BEDS The cabin is cold after the fire dies mid-night. I watch the rise and fall of my father’s steady breath, just beyond his red whiskers and long black hair. My brother is nestled with…
Flash Nonfiction by Sydney Lea FALLING SHY / NOSTALGIA Falling Shy My boyhood house is not the home of my heart. That wouldn’t surprise you if you knew some things I know, though I won’t examine any of them and…
Poetry by Sam Kerbel AFTER-BIRTH There is much grief tied to us Not unlike a hospital cot Where a new father sleeps If he is lucky And finds himself realizing Not for the first time He authored something He knows…