Poetry: “Prison Planet,” by Zack Carson

All 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.

Prose: “Miss December,” by Dominic VIti

In the winter of XXXX’s seventeenth year, bone cancer put her beloved mother to rest under the hospital bed’s white sheets, the same winter her dog chased a rabbit into the woods and never came home, froze to death in the night’s snow, a comforter that only brought more cold, so quick and thick the […]

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 […]