Fiction: “Amateur Altruism” By Jody Azzouni

… okay you have to start over, that’s all. Huh? We’re at the beginning of the program again okay? Soup Kitchen: just start in on it like: here’s the big event that ended it, the event that no one talks about. I guess. Once upon a time—now it’s your turn: Go

Fiction: “Struggle” by Evan McMurry

Mikhail Feldman the writer disappeared from this world on June 19th, 1939—or, in the words of my grandfather, went poof. This happened on the street in Peredelkino, southwest of Moscow, in front of a café, though it seems strange to me to mark the spot of someone’s disappearance. It seems to me he could have […]

Fiction: “Opticon” by J.A. Bernstein

His company had been stationed on the Lebanon Line for four months, and in that time, they’d only seen “action” twice. The first was an unreported skirmish, late one, night when a forward party, crawling through thickets of scrub oak and sage, was greeted with a volley of shots—low, whipping tracers, which hadn’t touched a […]

Poetry: “The World Until Yesterday” by Will Walker

For my father You keep him alive with longing and regret, memory a patient spider lashing someone once living to that yesterday when his story stopped and you became one of those spirits divorced from morning sun, riding an iceberg calved from the land, looking shoreward at dusk. But all the metaphors […]

Poetry: “The Whole Sky Rises Up” by Linda Swanberg

one winter alone in your little cabin you worked meticulously on model ships fingers looped thread after thread—tied tiny knots made sails: red silk sails blue sails the color of cornflower stiff white sails cut from a sheet, glued, and dried from each deck you positioned cannons— stealth down to the least detail […]

Fiction: “Breathing Beneath the Water” by Adam Caldwell

1. The degree hung on the wall over a piano that Ted’s son Billy no longer played. Sage had bought Billy an electric guitar. An amp. Signed him up for summer indie rock camp. They were learning the Undertones’ Teenage Kicks. So now Billy went around the apartment singing “are teenage dreams so hard to […]

Poetry: “Undergraduates” by Dan Jacoby

lost one night in st. louis down from chicago drinking wine with brakemen, nuns, whores auditioning farm girls haunting rogers hall for a fox double scotch rocks grosse point boy sneered an echo at love looking through the hole he put in his own head in 1967 we were electric a double feature in the […]

Fiction: “The Earth Falls to the Apple” by Saramanda Swigart

At word of Lord Thomas’s arrival, Ursula’s mother fanned herself with a napkin. Half-moons of sweat had gathered under her arms. Several weeks before, Lord Thomas had written that he’d be hunting in the area. Were Ursula’s fourteenth birthday feast to occur while he was there, he said, he’d make every effort to attend. He […]

Poetry: “Civilization and its Discontents” by Martin H. Levinson

I bite my lips, pinch my thighs, pray I don’t pound you into the ground or chuck myself off the twenty-second floor terrace we are standing on as your sip your Singapore Sling, munch on a pretzel, pontificate over climate change, feminism, the lack of civility in American society and your aching feet that […]

Fiction: “Hanley’s Suggestion” by Todd Easton Mills

Recidivists! And I’m one of them— Killer-diller in my two-tone stompers. Hi-de-ho! We’re cooking with gas. It was a smoggy morning in August, already 120 degrees. In the quad below office workers were taking their 8:45 break. Hanley adjusted the binocular feature on his eyeglasses, which magnified the leaves of a live oak and revealed […]