UChicago's Oldest Literary Magazine
One unseasonably warm Saturday in late January Val’s phone rang. He picked up the receiver and said an unsuspecting “Hello.” Carrie said, simply, “Hi.” He’d thought she had damned him by now for his silence, his necessary relinquishment. “How are you?” she asked. “Uh . . . well, I think.” He smelled roses, the scent […]
Read More Prose: “The Glimmering Woods,” by Richard JacobsBustling check-in desk, suited men. Orderly queue –
duty free sake. Vexed boy humpfed away.
Eleventh hour tannoy inspirits discomfort. She lays
Japanese Red Army’s blasting cap. Oyster-white
peripheries shock to black
He puts himself
at the head
of the long table
in front of the
killer whale-sized
In the blackout storm, our wings
shear through ravages of cloud
seen only in flashes. Compassing
our trackway toward you, we wheel
into dirty weather.
Her body is rotting. Allison knows this, just as she knows the four chambers of the heart—two atria, two ventricles—and how to stitch a simple continuous suture. When she slices open the cadaver, y-shape, petals of flesh blooming underneath her fingers, her advisor praises her steady hands. Beneath her mask, Allison smiles. There was a […]
Read More Prose: “something that knows it’s dead,” by Isabel YacuraAll night (when isn’t it night?) the flat fields sleep unsound,
the megacities spit and thrum with their overdrive generators,
babies shawled in naked terror howl for 24-hour shifts in test chambers.
Earth is round the way a cattle prod is round.
Electricity churns and spits, sprinting through Hell World, block after block.
Read More Poetry: “Prison Planet,” by Zack CarsonHis 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
In the bedroom of a small apartment outside Kielce in Poland, a man named Gustaw Smolak had a heart attack just as his wife left to get groceries in their olive green Camaro. The Smolak family lived on the second floor of a building that had been redecorated so many times by its tenants over […]
Read More Fiction: “Good Taste” by Dana SchwartzGam never cuddled or cooed. She didn’t linger or inquire or speak of love. She had suffered the loss of her husband over two decades ago and, though they hadn’t laughed often, when they did, it was deep and hearty. Gam smothered bread with butter and piled ham high between the white, buttery slices, serving […]
Read More Fiction: “Into the Horizon” by Kacy CunninghamAdele Wegner was born in Youngstown, Ohio and lives in Chicago. She is a writer and artist and works in the field of psychology and mental health. Her poems have been published in Columbia Poetry Review and Burningword.
Read More Poetry: “Of the Storm (Sleepless Eye)” by Adele Wegner
Euphony Journal 