Poetry: “Under Foot” by Eleanore Lee

I’m a rock.
Well, sometimes I say rock, but other times pebble feels more right.
Whatever
The point is
I look up and see your flapping […]

Poetry: “On Tirelessly Bashing Elbows Into The Stillness of The Bar” by Lee Hodge

Today it feels as if the impulse of checking
My email on my phone has been reduced
To the firing of a single synapse maybe
That is a deadly topography
The matrices of sensation for […]

Prose: “The Grief Response” by Paul García

Alma sleeping beside him, he stared at the ceiling. These days the house was too quiet. Sorrow sat on his chest. Tears flowed from his eyes, soundless as the empty room across the hall. Like going away, to stay, you know, for good… Always daring, all his life he’d taken chances, faced down bullies and […]

Prose: “Practice” by Matthew Fiander

I’m not the tell-me-your-troubles kind of bartender. I keep to myself. Stand-offish was how one drunk guy put it once — the bar held him up as he slurred through some sob-story about his wife or girlfriend or money — but I don’t know about all that. I just do my job, act as gatekeeper […]

Poetry: “SHE WOULDN’T LET ME KISS HER” by Susan Tollefson

She wouldn’t let me kiss her except
in a Japanese garden by the river.
We went there
when snow covered the arched bridge,
the teahouse […]

Poetry: “Two Rooms” by Nels Hanson

“Are the living happier than
the dead?” children wonder
when they turn over a scarlet
brick and find a lost Atlantis.
There the worms […]

Poetry: “YOSEMITE IN DECEMBER” by Laurie Lessen Reiche

Every snowflake is an electric light of love, molecular
kisses tissue-thin coasting down from heaven’s
arboretum with drifts of frigid sweet alyssum
falling, falling, falling in pieces carrying remnants of serenity
and angelic peace from that snowy place […]

Poetry: “Dunes at Dawn” by Mirana Comstock

I keep track of the deepening circles
under my eyes
as if they were redwood rings
showing the number of nights
without sleep […]

Poetry: “Flood” by Celia Meade

Our house sat at the bottom of a hill,
where it all started, where we began,
the ground fertile, but the structure rotten.
It rocked and eventually fell,
the walls crashing outward toward […]

Prose: “Tin’s Grand Entrance” by Alan Gartenhaus

We called her Tin, and she had been old all our lives. She was already in her late sixties when my mother and her brothers were kids and christened her “Tin,” abbreviating her name––as young children are wont to do––from “Tante Lillian” to “Ta-lin” to “Tin.” The nickname stuck. Now, at age ninety-eight, Tin was […]