Poetry: “Quarks,” by Jim Krosschell

A poet I know lives on Noyes Street.
Not Dogma Drive
where what we see
is what we get,
but a neighborhood of wavicles, oscillations, uncertainties,

Poetry: “Periodic,” by Rebecca Myers

His final breaths
served as a reminder
that dying had been kept
from me all these years: Yes,
I wept, but more
because of the ecstatic
unbraiding that accompanied
the irregular pattern
of rapid gasps and
apnea

Poetry: “a black love,” by Richie George

innervates, selfsame bodies
half-built causeways birth still water
sunk the veiled North
Sea moss, our love: a cutlass sharpened
water-ice winnows visions of solemn service

Prose: “Don’t Be Afraid to Forget,” by Griffin Gudaitis

While I was at Dave’s wake, all I could think about was the last time he got laid. Since graduation, he’d been on three or four dates, but none of them really went anywhere. This thought just cropped up in my mind, not that it brought me any particular joy, but seeing that it wasn’t […]

Poetry: “The Tiger-eye Necklace,” by Lynn D. Gilbert

Really, the old guy impersonated
himself, the rolling eye and teeth-bared grimace
straight out of silent movies. He’d known
vaudeville too, and, in the old sense,
burlesque. Gestures from Yiddish theater—

Prose: “Walter,” by Gary Kimball

The first time I saw Walter he was coming out of building across the street from my office. He looked nervous, the way he swung his head around one way and then the other as he locked the door and hurried up the sidewalk, pushing long, black strands of hair off his face and glancing […]

Poetry: “Story,” by Giles Goodland

The unnamed narrator coats the stones like rain. He says: There is logos inside the logo, logic in the log, but watch the long-sleeved willow in autumn as it sways: willow, hold your suede over the colossus of loss, your shadow strides the forest seeking seeking. He says: Where the blackbirds fire songs a story […]

Prose: “The Oneironautics Conference,” by Nemo Arator

The Oneironautics Conference was scheduled to begin at eight o’clock Saturday morning in a city two hundred miles north of the town where I lived. So Friday night after work I set out, driving until I became too tired, then turned onto a dirt road and parked in the approach to a farmer’s field. I […]

Poetry: “What You Say When You Die,” by J. R. Forman

you think of hot evenings watching cottontails scatter
at the yip of waking coyotes
you think of watching clouds of heat lightning
glimmer like pearly gates
you think of baseball fishing in the pond

Poetry: “Strange weather we’re having these last days,” by Jane Wiseman

Startled awake, I left my frayed brain
resting in its head-case as I floated away
up to the ceiling, out of the long window
into the northern hardy redbud just outside
beginning its flower, tight pink nodules